Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature 036741029X, 9780367410292

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Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature

This is the first book to study how Haitian authors – from independence in 1804 to the modern Haitian diaspora – have adapted Greco-Roman material and harnessed it to Haiti’s legacy as the world’s first anti-colonial nation-state. In nine chronologically organized chapters built around individual Haitian authors, Hawkins takes readers on a journey through one strand of Haitian literary history that draws on material from ancient Greece and Rome. This cross-disciplinary exploration is composed in a way that invites all readers to discover a rich and exciting cultural exchange that foregrounds the variety of ways that Haitian authors have ‘hacked classical forms’ as part of their creative process. Students of ancient Mediterranean cultures will learn about a branch of the Greco-Roman legacy that has never been deeply explored. Experts in Caribbean culture will find a robust register of Haitian literature that will enrich familiar texts. And those interested in anti-colonial movements will encounter a host of examples of artists creatively engaging with literary monuments from the past in ways that always keep the Haitian experience in central focus. Written in a broadly accessible style, Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature appeals to anyone interested in Haiti, Haitian literature and history, anti-colonial literature, or classical reception studies. Tom Hawkins, Associate Professor of Classics at Ohio State University (U.S.A), specializes in Greek literature and its legacies. He wrote Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire, serves on the Advisory Board of Eos, and is the faculty mentor for Black Students in Classics.

Classics and the Postcolonial Edited by Rosa Andújar Justine McConnell King’s College London

Classics and the Postcolonial publishes monographs, critical editions, and essay collections that explore the invocations and uses of Graeco-Roman antiquity in postcolonial contexts across the globe. Though the emphasis is on the postcolonial, our scope is deliberately broad and includes books which interrogate issues stemming from, and intersecting with, colonialism and imperialism, such as migration, slavery, race, gender, and sexuality. The series brings Classical and Postcolonial Studies into direct dialogue with each other, providing a space for cutting-edge work conducted at the intersection of the two fields. In addition to scholarly monographs and edited volumes, we warmly welcome proposals for critical editions and anthologies of dramatic and poetic texts. These may be of works originally written in any language, which adapt or engage with Graeco-Roman antiquity in exceptional and varied ways, whether to address sociopolitical realities or to speak to creative concerns. If you are interested in contributing to the series, please contact the series editors, Rosa Andújar and Justine McConnell (both at King’s College London), to discuss your project. Antígona by José Watanabe A Bilingual Edition with Critical Essays Cristina Pérez Díaz Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature Tom Hawkins

Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature Tom Hawkins

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Tom Hawkins The right of Tom Hawkins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-41029-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-31006-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82426-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

I dedicate this book to my wonderful parents, Rich and Diana, who have given me all that is important, and to the memory of my advisor and dear friend, Bob Gregg.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Series Editors Preface Epigraph – Oswald Durand, L’Épopée des aieux

Introduction

ix x xii xiii 1

Historical Segue 1 1804–1822: Saturn’s Children

25

1 ‘We Are All Greeks’: President Boyer’s Letter to Greek Revolutionaries (1822)

34

2 The ‘Lake of Lies’: Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859)

47

3 On Haiti and Black Egypt: Anténor Firmin’s De l’Égalité des Races Humaines (1885)

78

Historical Segue 2 From 19th c. Nationalism to 20th c. Populism

99

4 A Jumble of Names: Fernand Hibbert’s Romulus (1908)

105

5 Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside: Jean Price-Mars, Ansi Parla l’Oncle (1928)

123

6 Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer: Félix MorisseauLeroy, Antigòn en Creole (1953)

135

viii  Contents

Historical Segue 3 Duvalierism and the Haitian Diaspora

157

7 Antigòn in West Africa: Morisseau-Leroy’s Wa Kreyon (1978)

162

8 ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’: Dany Laferrière’s Le cri des oiseaux fous (2000)

180

9 The Revolt against Silence: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) with Julia Nelson Hawkins

204

Coda236 Bibliography240 Index260

Figures

I.1 The Palais Sans-Souci, Milot, Haiti, completed 1813. Photograph by Stefan Krasowski.

9

Acknowledgements

All scholarship emerges from a network of helpful forces – be they bibliographical resources, mentors, friends, employers, or otherwise – but this project owes a particular set of thanks to those bulwarks of support who inspired me to turn my career in a new direction and to those that afforded me the time to do so. At the front of the former category are those trailblazers in the field of Black Classicisms whose scholarship challenged me to think differently about my teaching and writing – especially Emily Greenwood, Denise McCoskey, Patrice Rankine and the visionary leaders of Eos Africana – and the Caribbeanists whose ideas frame my approach to Haitian history and literature, especially Marlene Daut, Michael Dash and Nadège Clitandre. I also could not have completed this book without the indefatigable support of the series editors, Rosa Andújar and Justine McConnell, whose scholarship, patience and friendship have sustained me every step of the way. I am also grateful to Amy Davis-Poynter and Marcia Adams, Editor and Editorial Assistant (respectively) for Classical Studies at Routledge, who have made the publication process smooth, efficient, and enjoyable, and to Jayachandran Rajendiran, Project Manager at Apex CoVantage, who has done the detailed work of preparing this manuscript for publication. And lastly, I would like to thank Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the Kenney Center, who inspired and gave his blessing to my use of his phrase ‘hacking classical forms’ in my title. In the latter category, I owe immense thanks for generous fellowships and grants from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University. Together, these organizations provided funding that gave me an extended period in which to focus on writing the chapters ahead. The Classics Department at Ohio State, together with my colleagues and students there, have been enormously supportive, and the Department of African American and African Studies has been a wonderful partner in my development of a cross-listed course on Black Classicisms, in which I have had the joy of working through a host of texts related to this project with several cadres of talented undergraduates. At the most personal level, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by a dynamic intellectual community among whom I have had the pleasure of trying out ideas and

Acknowledgements  xi engaging in countless hours of life-changing conversation. On this score, I owe particular thanks to Julia Nelson Hawkins, Sarah Iles Johnston and Fritz Graf, Amy Youngs and Ken Rinaldo, Richard Fletcher, Tom Dugdale, Brandon Bourgeois, Tawanda Chabikwa, Mathias Hanses, Harriet Fertik, Chris Parmenter, Denise McCoskey, Don Lavigne, Elizabeth Sharp, Dave and Allyson Wessells, Cheikh Thiam, Sam Johnson and Todd Thompson. Above all, I am grateful for the love and support of my family: Julia, Maddie and Phoebe.

Series Editors Preface

Tom Hawkins’ Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature illuminates the imbrication of Graeco-Roman antiquity with revolutionary freedom struggles against colonialism. Haiti is an especially fitting location with which to launch a dedicated examination of the ways in which Classics and the postcolonial have intersected with each other. The Haitian Revolution, which in the famous phrase of Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James was ‘the only successful slave revolt in history’, fundamentally reshaped imperial structures and the ways in which the world was understood and defined. In upending the dynamics of global power and the discourses which underpin them, Haiti became vital for understanding the Caribbean, the Americas, and the world. Hawkins’ book compellingly documents and explores the formation of Haitian anticolonial culture and the diverse ways in which it has interacted with European classical antiquity. Centred on the suggestive notion of ‘hacking’ as a mode of reception, Hawkins illustrates the multiple and varied transformations of texts and ideas from ancient Greece and Rome at the hands of Haitian artists, writers and intellectuals, who have refashioned and repurposed them for a range of anticolonial projects since the Haitian Revolution at the close of the eighteenth century. We are delighted to include Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature as the first monograph in the Classics and the Postcolonial series. Making accessible the rich range and variety of postcolonial engagements with ancient Greek and Roman antiquity across the globe is central to the aims of the series. Hawkins’ book achieves exactly that in the context of the Caribbean. In both its focus on Haiti and its expansive examination of cultural and intellectual engagements with the Graeco-Roman world, it offers a wide-ranging analysis that will appeal to Caribbeanists and Classicists alike. Rosa Andújar Justine McConnell

Epigraph – Oswald Durand, L’Épopée des aieux

Écoutez! Écoutez! C’est une autre Iliade. Elle eut son noir Achille et son Agamemnon! Dans notre Coeur le fer burina chaque nom, Ce sont des morts vivants! C’est toute une pléiade! . . . Voilà de nos aïeux la sanglante épopée! Ma voix, pour la chanter, pleure et rugit en vain. Il me faudrait le luth de l’aveugle divin, Ou la plume du Dante en du pur sang trempée! Listen! Listen! It’s another Iliad. With its black Achilles and its Agamemnon! Iron has chiseled each name into our hearts, They are the living dead! An entire Pleiad. . . . Behold the bloody epic of our ancestors! Trying to sing it, my voice weeps and bellows in vain. For more, I would need the divine blind man’s lute Or Dante’s pen, dipped in pure blood. – Oswald Durand, L’Épopée des aieux (Epic of the Ancestors, 1900)

Introduction

Son muchos los que han aprendido a la perfección el olimpo griego, pero no que existe otro olimpo, tropical y suyo, en la cúspide de la loma. ‘Many have thoroughly learned about the Greek Olympus but not that there exists another Olympus – tropical and all its own – at the top of the hill.’ – Excilia Saldaña, Kele Kele (1987)

Prologue: The Haitian Sophocles In an essay reflecting on the tradition of the arts in Haiti as a means of surviving and resisting tyranny, Edwidge Danticat made the striking claim that Sophocles, the ancient Greek playwright, had become a Haitian writer.1 Inspired by her riddling comment, which parallels Saldaña’s words in the epigraph above about another Olympus that is tropical rather than Greek, this book digs into the histories and narratives that inform Danticat’s words with the goal of teasing out their implications. In the chapters ahead, I broaden the question of how Sophocles could have become Haitian and reveal the creativity through which a range of Haitian writers have transformed material drawn from ancient Greece and Rome and remade it in the service of the ongoing project of Haitian anticolonial culture. Outside specialist circles, the importance of Haiti in anticolonial history is too rarely acknowledged or understood, and a second ambition for this project is to connect Haitian culture and literary history with other academic circles. In 1791 the enslaved population of the French colony of Saint-Domingue rose up, forged alliances with other racially stigmatized groups across the colony and eventually won their independence by defeating Napoleonic France.2 On the first day of 1804 the nation of Haiti came into being, and its leaders began the work of building a new type of polity – a modern state dedicated to opposing slavery and run entirely by those who had been marginalized (in most cases horrifically brutalized) by the racial politics of European colonization. One avenue for presenting the principles, values and experiences of this new nation was to engage with material drawn from the European classical curriculum (i.e., the study of the language, literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome).3 This mode of framing the Haitian project had the great advantage of communicating in terms of the educational idiom of DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-1

2  Introduction Europe, thereby giving Haitian intellectuals (most of whom were educated in Europe) entrée into that powerful cartel that Émeric Bergeaud described as the ‘aristocracy of nations’.4 Yet the European colonization projects that began in earnest in the fifteenth century were carried out by cultures framed by precisely this educational system, and the racialized norms that valorized whiteness while insisting on black inferiority, manifested most egregiously in the Transatlantic slave trade, claimed the ancient Greco-Roman world as the exclusive patrimony of European civilization.5 Ali Mazrui, the U.S.-Kenyan activist and academic, perfectly summarized this ideology that combined the classical curriculum and European colonization: ‘In an act of cultural piracy Europe has stolen classical Greece. But later, in an act of territorial annexation, “Europe stole the world”. And in the colonies which she annexed she passed on the message of Greece’ (1978, 96). In Mazrui’s terms, Haitians (like other non-white peoples) were outsiders to the study of this material by the pirates’ logic of white supremacy. Thus, no eyebrows were raised at the racial implications of English poet Percy Byshe Shelley writing in 1822 that ‘we are all Greeks’ (a phrase discussed in Chapter 1) or when the far less famous Jean-Paul Pillet, a wealthy French plantation owner from Saint-Domingue, composed an epistolary epic called Mon Odyssée (My Odyssey, completed in 1806) that recounts how he survived the Haitian Revolution and escaped to the U.S. Pillet’s story anticipates Frantz Fanon’s remark, in a book whose title derives from a Haitian poem, that ‘The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning’ (2007, 14).6 Early Haitian authors, by contrast, had to do something more assertive when they entered this literary mode of referencing the Greco-Roman canon that the pirates had claimed as their own. They had to engage in a process that I call hacking classical forms. The authors studied in the chapters ahead transform the allegedly European cultural prestige of ancient Greek and Roman material into a tool that works to advance the causes of black autonomy and dignity and cultural decoloniality in the face of European (and, before long, U.S.) imperialism.7 On Hacking Classical Forms The phrase hacking classical forms is not my own. I heard it spoken in November 2020, while much of the world was paralyzed by the Covid-19 pandemic. My partner, a specialist in medical humanities, organized an online event focused on the question of how the arts and humanities can help us understand and navigate such a global crisis. Her featured speakers were Frank M. Snowden, III and Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Snowden, a distinguished academic historian, had just published Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (2019), which includes a chapter on the impact of yellow fever on the Haitian Revolution and which seemed prescient, since it hit the shelves only a few weeks before the first cases of coronavirus were reported in China. Joseph, who has won accolades and awards as a dancer, playwright, spoken-word artist and educator, is the vice president and artistic director of social impact at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. As Joseph, whose parents came to the U.S. from Haiti, introduced himself,

Introduction  3 he summarized his career in the arts in terms of ‘taking a hip-hop sensibility and transposing it, in hacking classical forms’. My mind raced. I thought about Audre Lorde’s claim that ‘the master’s tools will never be able to dismantle the master’s house’ (2007, 110–13). Could the goal of dismantling be reconceived in terms of hacking? I thought of Toni Morrison’s cautionary description of erasing the vitality of ‘Afro-American art’ by ‘the gathering of a culture’s difference into the skirts of the Queen,’ thereby effecting ‘an incipient orphanization of the work in order to issue its adoption papers’ (1990, 134–35).8 The hip-hop artist who samples familiar standards and underappreciated gems avoids such ‘orphanization’ through a process of hacking and (re-)mastering that leads to a new and unexpected audioscape. That musical effect parallels Derek Walcott’s beguiling request that we behold his equally beguiling Helen of St. Lucia ‘with no Homeric shadow’ (1990, 111), a request built to fail by placing Homer unavoidably in our line of sight. Walcott’s Helen is (among other things) a St. Lucian woman in a yellow dress, St. Lucia itself (the ‘Helen of the West Indies’), a manifestation of Oshun (the Yoruba orisha who always has a yellow dress), and Homer’s Helen. His trick shows us that he too has escaped the dangers of ‘orphanization’, because he has hacked the epic form, Trojan mythology, and even the poet’s name, since the Omeros of Walcott’s title is not quite the name of the Greek poet (that would be Ὅμηρος or Homeros) and since Walcott hacks that name to pieces in his own way: ‘O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, os, a great bone’ (1990, 14).9 Joseph’s goal of hacking classical forms offers an antidote to the orphanization Morrison decries. Hacking conjures scenarios in which the codes of hegemony and orthodoxy are mastered, dismantled, and reconfigured in ways that are, in the best cases, artistic, creative, and progressive. Joseph’s phrase suggests an extension (one kind of hacking) of the ideas of Lorde, Morrison, Walcott and so many other innovative artists and thinkers. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe and Alexandre Pétion oversaw the final stages of dismantling the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the last months of 1803, they did not abandon an orphan to ‘the skirts of the Queen’. Instead, they hacked the mainframe of colonial control and created Haiti, a new and independent nation predicated on the rejection of slavery and European domination. Far more recently, this same pattern can be heard in Patrice Rankine’s analysis of U.S. President Barack Obama’s comment after the killing of Trayvon Martin that if he (Obama) had a son, he would look quite a bit like Martin. Rankine notes that ‘Obama [showed] how embodying a form can mean not slavish mastery but an improvisational artistry that alters the form – in his case, the American presidency – so that it bends to one’s will’ (2020, 268). The ‘improvisational artistry’ that Rankine finds in Obama’s words and in his embodiment of the U.S. presidency as a whole heaves close to my application of ‘hacking’ in this volume. As I hope to demonstrate in the pages to come, the creative process of hacking the forms of colonial governmental power in 1804 gave rise to the parallel process of Haitian artists hacking classical forms of literature (and, to be sure, other media as well). These authors – all

4  Introduction born in Saint-Domingue or Haiti, many writing from abroad, all foregrounding Haiti as a key element of their personal identity – engage with narratives and themes from ancient Greece and Rome but never with the intention of making Haiti into an Athens of the Caribbean.10 Instead, they all participate first and foremost in the Haitian project of building a modern anti-colonial culture. To that end, they simultaneously hack the classical forms of Greece and Rome by bringing them into the ambit of Haitian literature and, in so doing, offer counter-readings to the normalization of classical education as an expression of Euro-U.S. cultural hegemony. The Heuristics of Hacking As a framework for interpreting Haitian literature, the idea of hacking overspills its own boundaries in many directions. In one sense, hacking is the origin story around which the colony of Saint-Domingue and (from it) the nation of Haiti came into existence. The pre-Columbian cultures of Ayiti or Kiskeya or Bohio, as the island was known to the indigenous Taíno, largely disappeared once Spanish explorers killed most of the inhabitants (via violence or disease). Soon after 1697, when Spain ceded the western portion of Hispaniola (as they had named it) to France through the Treaty of Ryswick, French planters realized the profits that could be harvested from the hacking of sugar cane. Joseph emphasizes this in the opening lines of Scourge, his commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of Haitian independence: Our ancestors hacked bitterly at sugar cane we are the sweet never tasted by their sweat soaked tongues they begged for us to be here never knowing who, or what, we’d become we are the echoing elegy perpetually sung . . .11 The violent and dangerous hacking of cane slides into more overt manifestations of violence through the title to Edwidge Danticat’s 1998 novel The Farming of Bones (Chapter 9), in which the ‘bones’ are both the sclerotic cane stalks reaped through the brutal realities of the sugar industry and the human bodies hacked and mutilated along the Haitian-Dominican border in the Parsley Massacre of 1937. In this genocidal, race-based purge of Haitians, ordered by Dominican president and dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, Dominican soldiers often used machetes to hack Haitian bodies in a perversion of the cane harvest. In a very literal sense, then, Haiti has emerged from a history of hacking. More recently, however, the concept of hacking has been strongly associated with unauthorized technological interventions that enter public discourse when they are illegal and malicious. Behind and beneath the headlines that focus on hacking as a synonym for cyber-theft or cyber-espionage, a wide range of hacker communities thrive and devote themselves to hacking as the ‘exploration of technological possibilities and boundaries in unforeseen, innovative ways’ (Richterich and Wenz, 2017, 5). The university where I work sponsors an annual ‘hackathon’ event, which

Introduction  5 uses the concept of hacking as a synonym for technological innovation developed through anti-bureaucratic, anti-hierarchical methods of crowd-sourcing.12 In this sense, hacking is transgressive, innovative, and, most often, rooted in cutting edge computer or information technologies. But hacking easily stretches across a wider semantic range (since the notion of computer hacking can itself be hacked). One legend about the origins of hip-hop, for example, traces back to a moment in the 1970’s in New York City when someone hacked a public lamp post as a source of power and put on the first community-wide performance of a new musical style. Like all good myths, this one can be told in a variety of ways. Lonnie Morgan (2009) claims that it was D. J. Kool Herc in 1974 who noticed construction workers tapping into electricity via the lamp post and later brought out his turntables and speakers. Hanif Abdurraquib (2019, 15), in his paean to A  Tribe Called Quest, attaches the story to Grandmaster Caz and Disco Wiz in 1977, with the wonderful added detail that the DJs, whose performance ended with a massive failure of the power grid, feared that they had shut down the city’s electrical supply by drawing too much current from that fabled lamp post. Joseph’s vision of creative hacking as an artistic practice, therefore, has deep roots in the hip-hop culture that is one font of his inspiration. The expression of hacking that I find most productive for approaching Haitian literature is that set out by Denise Ferreira da Silva in her discussion of ‘hacking the subject’. Her feminist approach to hacking moves to transfigure “woman” (and with her the female and the feminine), to deface her, and release her to accomplish what she alone can perform, which is the dis/ordering of the modern grammar in which the patriarch remains the presupposed bearer of self-determination in its ethical and judicial renderings, respectively liberty and authority. (Da Silva 2018, 22) Such transformational thinking responds to the resonant frequency of the Greek myth of Pandora, an originary and composite female constructed on patriarchal authority, and da Silva’s vision suggests ways in which Pandora can be hacked and reconfigured to look less like an automaton of the Olympians and more like an autonomous subject. By shifting the focus from the cultural production of the gendered subject to the origins of Haiti (with its gendered and racialized subjects), we can see how well da Silva’s terms apply. Haiti transfigured and defaced European colonialism, thereby disrupting ‘the modern grammar’ of late eighteenth-century imperialist patriarchy. Seen from this perspective, the Haitian Revolution amounts to a hacking of the structures of power that had given order to the Americas ever since Columbus established La Navidad, Spain’s first settlement in the New World on Christmas Eve 1492 near what is today Cap-Haïtien on the north coast of Haiti. Such hacking is equal parts destructive and creative, as it ripped the horrors of slavery away from the mechanisms, technologies, bureaucracies and authorities of the colonial Atlantic and thereby brought into existence something new and radically different.

6  Introduction Moving from the violent spasms of revolution to the development and expansion of a national literature (which is importantly part of various other literatures – American and Caribbean, Francophone, Anglophone and Creole literatures, etc.), hacking can serve as a model for interpretation, especially in terms of the various ways that Haitian authors have looked to ancient Greek and Roman cultures for the raw material of contemporary transformation. Da Silva again: ‘Hacking here is de\composition, or a radical transformation (or imaging) that exposes, unsettles, and perverts form and formulae. It is an active and purposeful mis-understanding, mis-reading, mis-appropriation. Hacking is a kind of reading, which is at once an imaging (in Benjamin’s sense, in reference to the work done by the dialectical image) and a composition (as description of a creative act), but also recomposition of elements, in the sense the term has in alchemy’ (2018, 27). While Da Silva’s primary interest is constructions of the (gendered) self, a similar type of hacking is at work with language as well. Marlene NourbeSe Philip, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and now lives in Canada, finds a linguistic alchemy (which she glosses as ‘al kimiya, the art of the black and Egypt’) in the necessity for Caribbean writers to confront the intersection of language and historical oppression (she focuses on English but the same can be said of other colonial languages): ‘The language as we know it has to be dislocated and acted upon – even destroyed – so that it begins to serve our purposes .  .  . The place African Caribbean writers occupy is one that is unique, and one that forces the writer to operate in a language that was used to brutalize and diminish Africans so that they would come to a profound belief in their own lack of humanity . . . The challenge, therefore, facing the African Caribbean writer who is at all sensitive to language and to the issues that language generates, is to use the language in such a way that the historical realities are not erased or obliterated, so that English is revealed as the tainted tongue it truly is. Only in so doing will English be redeemed’ (19).13 In passages such as this, Philip shares in clear prose the method that underpins her poetry, which is often fragmented, interrupted, crowded and semantically open. Her approach to language – the need to address the historical complicity of language and to resituate it for the present – amounts to a form of hacking, even though she does not use this specific term. The authors studied in this volume have all engaged in forms of cultural and literary hacking. They have presented ‘radical transformation(s)’ of material drawn from the classical curriculum in order to ‘expose’ and ‘unsettle’ (in da Silva’s sense) the logic of Euro-U.S. colonialism that has often justified itself via that very same curriculum. In so doing, they lay bare the prejudices of power and unsettle the purveyors of that power. If ‘hacking is a kind of reading’ (da Silva) then reading and writing can be a form of ‘hacking’ too. This is one way of understanding Danticat’s call to ‘create dangerously’. That phrase, which she has hacked from the work of Camus, applies equally well to those who brought Haiti into existence, to those who, in Danticat’s description, donned make-shift togas to perform scenes depicting the violent excesses of imperial Rome as a risky form of commentary on Duvalierist Haiti, and to those authors who have insisted and continue to insist that the creative laboratory of Greek and Roman ideas remain open to all.14

Introduction  7 For Jeremy Hunsinger and Andrew Schrock, hacking spans both the creative act of transforming something old and familiar into something new and the dissemination of that innovative transformation such that it can impact public awareness and discourse. For reasons both ideological and expedient, that innovation, on their reading, necessitates an element of forgetting (2016, 535): Hacking and making movements are plural and diverse, but in no way are they entirely new. These movements have specific histories, cultures, and traditions. As they quickly sprawl across national and geographic boundaries, they tend to forget those stories and lineages . . . .Forgetting serves a function for the public, allowing them to get on with their own interests. Concurrently, this public forgetting allows hackers to regain their spaces of creativity and action. . . . Forgetting, an important social and cultural project, is also part of the democratic project. Democracies forget to put aside old tensions and re-form in order for the public to support them. In this sense, my own agenda – as someone who accepts reading as a kind of hacking and hacking as a lens through which to understand literary histories – is an attempt to reverse some aspects of this process of forgetting. The Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, a top-down bureaucratic directive to forget and ignore a disgraced and fallen elite, can be creatively, perhaps only partially, undone through a process of transformatio memoriae, by speaking again to new audiences about the importance of the Haitian project of rejecting colonialism and enslavement, by remembering the art with which Haitian authors have sampled antiquity (sampling not in the colonial sense of enjoying a buffet of extracted commodities but in the spirit of Joseph’s ‘hip-hop sensibility’), by carefully selecting out strands that become the warp and weft of wholly new stories, and by discovering new interpretations of Greco-Roman antiquity when seeing it through the lens of Haitian literary history. Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Art and Architecture Before turning to Haitian literature, which is the main topic of this book, it will be helpful to demonstrate (and broaden) the dynamics of hacking by first examining two examples of Haitian material art. I begin with the Palais Sans-Souci and its complement, the Citadelle Laferrière in northern Haiti. These two massive structures were built under Henri Christophe, whose career moved from enslavement in Saint-Domingue to leadership in the Revolution to serving as President and, ultimately, King of Haiti. In the first generation after the Revolution he oversaw the building of these structures due south of Cap-Haïtien, about 20 and 25 kilometers from the coast, respectively. They are among the earliest examples of Haitian material culture (in the narrow sense of excluding colonial or indigenous material culture that predate the establishment of Haiti as a new and independent nation in 1804), and they speak to ‘the promise and ambition of an independent black nation in the heart of the West Indies’ (Minosh 2018, 410). Christophe had begun

8  Introduction working on the Citadelle immediately after Haiti’s independence, when he was the top lieutenant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. By 1813, when both structures were inaugurated, Christophe had declared himself King Henry I of Haiti (changing from Henri to Henry in the process) in the wake of the assassination of Dessalines in 1806. For the next decade and a half, Christophe ruled the northern part of Haiti, while Alexandre Pétion ruled the south. In 1820, with his health and his rule failing, Christophe died by suicide in Sans-Souci and was buried in the Citadelle. The Citadelle Laferrière is a hulking redoubt located on Mt. Laferrière, and it was intended to serve as a bastion and stronghold against European re-invasion. Its overall form evokes the hull of a ship, especially the Batterie Coidavid, which looks strikingly like a prow. This paradoxical mountainous vessel, a response to the boats that carried out the transatlantic traffic of bodies but also a threatening, longdistance naval defense of the palace below it, looms high above Sans-Souci, which presents a very different aesthetic. This palace, which is now in ruins, ‘materialized strict adherence to neoclassical principles of separation, symmetry, and the use of Greco-Roman stylistic elements’ (Monroe 2017, 6). The various neoclassical elements forge obvious connections to European architectural traditions, such as the Doric hexastyle propylaeum. A  much-degraded female bust, supposedly the last remnant of a line of fifteen statues taken or destroyed by soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) and often claimed to be modeled on Christophe’s wife, Queen Marie-Louise, shows recognizably Greek stylings, including a theatrical mask that hangs across her chest. Pompée Valentin, Baron de Vastey, personal secretary to Christophe, described the church attached to the palace as the ‘Haitian Pantheon’ (Panthéon haytien, 1819, 202), and his comment reflects both an architectural and a political reality. Like the Pantheon in Paris and its classical antecedent in Rome, the church at Sans Souci (now known as the Cathédrale de Milot, which suffered major structural damage from a fire on April 13, 2020) presents a combination of columns, pediment and dome, and Christophe originally used the building as a mausoleum for heroes of the Revolution.15 Sans-Souci is a remarkable architectural complex, all the more so since it was conceived and created by a man born into colonial slavery who had become a king and since it is located on the site of what had been a French plantation where Christophe had once worked as an overseer. But what messages do the neoclassical trappings of the palace foster? The best answer seems to be that they promote debate and forestall certitude.16 Francis Leary finds elements of Versailles and Fontainebleau, an argument that assumes an idealization of French architecture and praises Christophe’s achievement for approximating that lofty standard (1994, 47). His view contrasts sharply with early detractors, who dismissed the structure as looking rather like a factory (e.g., Harvey 1827, 134–135). Based on a detailed study of the site’s archaeological remains, J. Cameron Monroe concludes that the neoclassical aspects of the palace were ‘domesticated to serve decidedly Haitian political agendas’ (2020, 244), while Peter Minosh sees the building of Sans-Souci as ‘an act of colonial mimicry undermining its model and a reification of the state apparatus’ (2018, 424). These perspectives can all lead toward evaluations of Sans Souci (negatively) as a desperate effort

Introduction  9

Figure I.1  The Palais Sans-Souci, Milot, Haiti, completed 1813. Source: Photograph by Stefan Krasowski.

to imitate French neoclassical culture or (positively) as an attempt to decouple neoclassicism from European whiteness. Yet I find the most compelling moment of hacking the significance of this neoclassical structure in another comment by Vastey, a witness intimately involved with the creation of Sans Souci and thoroughly steeped in the classical norms of French education.17 In reflecting on the dedication of the palace in 1813, Vastey asked his readers not to imagine the grandeur of Europe but instead to recognize that Sans Souci and its church were ‘built by the descendants of Africa, proving that we have not lost the architectural taste and genius of our ancestors who covered Ethiopia, Egypt, Carthage, and Old Spain, with their superb monuments’ (1819, 201).18 Vastey presents Christophe’s architectural achievement not as an imitation or an equaling of European stylings – indeed French models are here ignored altogether – but, rather, as an example of living up to a noble but long-dormant cultural legacy that originated in Africa (a theme that will be discussed in a different vein in Chapters 3 and 5). The meaning Vastey finds in the building takes shape between the obvious neoclassical details and his willful act of forgetting such proximate European models and fostering, instead, an older filiation that leads from Africa, through ‘Old Spain’ (which presumably means the Al-Andalus era of the Iberian Peninsula) and into Haiti. My second example of hacking in Haitian art focuses on iterations of Julius Caesar’s famous tricolon veni, vidi, vici, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’, which has

10  Introduction become so widely known and so often reworked that the original can feel less important than the ongoing and self-sustaining tradition. Much of the dynamic vitality of this phrase can now be sensed its appearances within the world of hip-hop. For example, the Haitian artists D-Fi Powèt Revòlte and Ken-Fs (who rap in Creole) released an album called Veni Vidi Vici in 2020. The title track, which explores the alure and pitfalls of the rap world, has a central break, in which D-Fi repeats the lines mouri an brav, viv lib, veni, vidi, amavi, vici. The first two elements riff on the French Revolutionary slogan vivre libre ou mourir, ‘live free or die’, which Dessalines supposedly shouted as he ripped away the white section of the French flag in order to create the template for the new Haitian flag just after defeating the French forces at the Battle of Vertières in 1803. In the song, D-Fi brings this sentiment into Creole: mouri an brav, viv lib, ‘die brave, live free,’ before extending Caesar’s Latin: veni, vidi, amavi, vici, ‘I came, I saw, I loved, I conquered’. The addition of amavi, ‘I loved’, lays bare the connection between erotic and violent conquest, that is a commonplace in both hip-hop music and Roman history, as witnessed in Caesar’s own entangled relationship with Cleopatra. This Haitian duo is building up on a rich discourse within hip-hop that stretches back at least to 1999, when U.S. rapper Ja Rule released Venni, Vetti, Vecci, an album title that plays with the sounds and spelling of Caesar’s phrase while also choosing not to replicate his words exactly. More frequently, the phrase is reworked in English rather than in Latin, as in ‘Encore’ from Jay-Z’s 2003 The Black Album: ‘And I need you to remember one thing (one thing)/I came, I saw, I conquered/from record sales to sold-out concerts.’ The following year, Ludacris varied the phrase with ‘I came, I saw, I hit ‘em right dead in the jaw,’ repeated several times in ‘Get Back’ from The Red Light District (2004). Pitbull, who sings in English, Spanish and Spanglish, shifts the ordering of ideas and extends the sibilance of the line with ‘I saw, I came, I conquered/Or should I say, I saw, I conquered, I came’ in ‘Fireball’ from Globalization (2014). And in the track ‘Praise the Lord (Da Shine)’ from Testing (2018), A$AP Rocky ends a verse with the word ‘conquer’, and Skepta, the featured guest, begins the chorus by repeating the phrase ‘I came, I saw.’ Each renewed evocation of Caesar’s phrase showcases the artist’s skill at reworking the laconic claim to power and redirecting it in various ways that simultaneously generate authority within hip-hop culture. Something similar can be seen in a pair of paintings connected to Haiti. JeanMichel Basquiat, whose father came to the U.S. from Haiti in 1955, painted the phrase vini, vidi, vici several times on his ‘The Man from Naples’ (1982).19 This twist on the phrase replaces Caesar’s veni (‘I came’) with vini. Amid the many other words painted across the canvass, Basquiat writes ‘wine’ (at least) three times (the words are partially obscured, so it is difficult to be precise), signaling his undermining of Caesar’s militant quip with something more Dionysiac. Vini is a form of the Latin word for wine (vinum) and also means ‘wines’ in Italian, an obvious point of reference for a painting about a man from Naples. Although Basquiat’s phrase does not demand translation, these associations suggest something like ‘I drank. I saw. I conquered’.

Introduction  11 ‘The Man from Naples’ is covered with words, and Basquiat’s version of the Caesarian phrase appears in several guises. Once in black near the top-center (VINI VIDI VICI), another time in white near the middle of the painting with each word on separate lines, a third time on the right margin with the phrase varied slightly, ‘(VICI) VINIVIDI’, and once in red in the lower right with the lettering partially erased. Basquiat’s interest in this phrase does not seem to intersect with his connection to Haiti, but other works from this era do. Although Basquiat never visited Haiti, the island’s history clearly interested him, as can be seen in an untitled work from 1982 containing the words ‘Haiti,’ and ‘L’Overture versus Bonaparte’, among other details, and in his 1983 ‘Toussaint l’Ouverture versus Savonarola,’ which contains a portrait of Louverture. In that same year, he also painted a portrait of Caesar (‘Julius Caesar’, 1983). Basquiat’s engagement with both this Latin phrase and Haiti comes together in ‘Hommage à Basquiat’ (2021) by the Haitian painter Jean-Jacques Stephen Alexis, who signs his paintings JanJakII and now works in Miami. Alexis is the son of Jacques Stephen Alexis (1922–1961), one of Haiti’s greatest novelists and one of the many patriots executed under the regime of François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. In ‘Homage à Basquiat’, the younger Alexis imitates Basquiat’s style and includes many tell-tale details, such as the familiar tag ‘SAMO’, variations on Basquiat’s nearly ubiquitous crown, and the prominent role of written words. Many details connect strongly with Haitian history, such as the names ‘Dessalines’ and ‘Bonaparte’ (the latter upside-down and crossed out), Dessalines’ legendary exhortation to ‘live free or die’, ‘1492’ under three crosses and ‘1804’, the date of Haitian independence.20 In the central section of the painting, the words ‘VINI VICI VIDI’ appear, one on top of the other. Like all such writings presented in Basquiat’s style, no clear interpretive cues are given, and the viewer has the freedom to create meaning and associations in many ways. To my eye, what is most prominent in Alexis’ painting is the teasing out of Basquiat’s interest in Haiti, the displacement of the more internationally famous Louverture with the more radically liberationist Dessalines, and the continued reformulation of Caesar’s phrase. Perhaps most interestingly in terms of language, Alexis’ use of vini now suggests not only wine (via the Latin and Italian that Basquiat had reformulated) but also something like Caesar’s ‘I came’. In Creole, vini is the verb ‘to come’, and it would be part of the phrase ‘I came’ (mwen (te) vini). Thus, Alexis’ ‘VINI’ floats between Caesar’s Latin veni, Basquiat’s Latinate vini (with English ‘wine’ lurking), and the Creole vini. This latter point also serves to emphasize Basquiat’s connection to Haiti, since from a Haitian perspective Basquiat’s ‘VINI’ also resonates with Creole vini. In all these examples of reworking Caesar’s veni, vidi, vici, concern for Roman historical accuracy and proper Latin are almost totally irrelevant, but by exporting the swagger and punchiness of Caesar’s iconic articulation of his power (originally spoken at a key moment in his movement toward transforming the Roman Republic into an Empire), these hip-hop artists and painters have hacked the phrasebook of classical education. No longer should we be focused on Caesar’s achievements or terrified by his limitless ambition, they seem to say. Instead, variations of this

12  Introduction quip are proof that such classical forms now exist to be hacked – reformulated and repurposed – by creative artists across an array of new eras and social contexts. All these examples of hacking represent the creative re-use and re-configuration of cultural material in the name of signifyin(g), as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has discussed that concept as a literary phenomenon, and ‘re-existence’ in Walter Mignolo’s anthropological formulation of finding new forms of existence and resistance within the myriad pathways of decoloniality.21 Such dynamics are similarly at work throughout the chapters ahead, each of which studies an author working to articulate Haitian culture and Haiti’s importance as the world’s first anti-colonial nation. To be sure, that project is understood in strikingly different terms in different eras and consequently each author manifests unique approaches and insights to Haiti’s role in the world. Each author also charts a path for taking familiar elements drawn from the Greco-Roman canon and using them to articulate, defend, update and refine Haiti’s stance of thorough and fundamental rejection of European colonial domination. Interdisciplinary Foundation I: Why Haiti Matters This is the first book to study the role of ancient Greek and Roman influences in Haitian literary history, and many readers will come to these pages knowing much more about one of those intellectual strands and less about the other. This and the following two sections aim to provide a shared foundation for understanding the goals of this cross-disciplinary project. These paragraphs that situate the fields of Haitian Studies and Classics are necessarily brief and intentionally superficial, since my goal is merely to provide readers with basic toeholds in the two traditions intertwined in the chapters ahead. Haiti matters, because it is the first modern nation to establish itself in opposition to slavery and the European colonial system that shaped Atlantic history starting in 1492. This rejection of colonial enslavement gained momentum with an uprising in 1791 (known as the Bois Caïman ceremony) that culminated with the Haitian Declaration of Independence on the first day of 1804.22 This revolutionary transformation obviously shares certain patterns with the American (1765–1791) and French (1789–1799) Revolutions of the same era, but the differences are as important as the similarities among these three violent upheavals.23 The former, inspired by European Enlightenment ideals and the colonies’ desire to be unfettered by British constraints, led to the establishment of the first modern nation in the western hemisphere, but this radical change in superstructure left the social infrastructure of the former colonies essentially intact – an agricultural economy predicated on slave labor forcibly imported from Africa, the displacement or extermination of indigenous peoples, and a wealthy and educated class of European immigrants that remained constant throughout the revolutionary era.24 France, to be sure, experienced major internal social upheaval as impoverished masses rose up to tear down a decadent aristocracy, but the colonial imperialism of the French monarchy was soon replaced by that of the Napoleonic era. The African American scholar, educator and early intersectional feminist Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964),

Introduction  13 whose training as a classicist represents only one part of her academic profile, brings this theme out in her 1925 doctoral dissertation which demonstrates that the issue of slavery in the French colonies served as the critical test of French Enlightenment ideals.25 Haiti, by contrast, effected fundamental transformations both externally and internally, by liberating itself from the exploitative and extractive slave-based system of colonial France (which controlled colonial Saint-Domingue – now Haiti – from the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick until 1804) and by giving the formerly enslaved population not only freedom but citizenship, which afforded all Haitians the same basic constitutional rights and status, regardless of whether they had been free or enslaved prior to the Revolution and irrespective of race or skin-color.26 It is for this reason that Laurent Dubois has described the Haitian Revolution as ‘the most radical political transformation of the “Age of Revolution” ’ (2004b, 3).27 Just as ancient Athens is regularly hailed as the birthplace of democracy, so Haiti deserves similar plaudits as the birthplace of the anti-colonial nation.28 Athens and Haiti, as several of the authors assert in the pages to come, make a fitting pair, despite the fact that the Caribbean country has, from its very inception, been viewed internationally with various mixtures of skepticism, antagonism, paternalism, racism, and neo-colonial greed. As recently as 1995, the Haitian historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot could rightly describe the Haitian Revolution as an ‘unthinkable’ event within the Euro-U.S. mentality (1995, 70–107). Not only were the eighteenth century colonial elites of Saint-Domingue unable to fathom a slave uprising of any significance even as revolution was in the air, but immediately after the victory of 1804, leaders across Europe and the U.S. found it impossible to square the Revolution with assumptions, especially racialized assumptions, about how the world works. A nation run by dark-skinned people of (largely) African descent, many of whom had formerly been enslaved was simply ‘unthinkable’. For this reason, the Haitian Revolution became a permanent blind spot among the colonial powers. Since the publication of Trouillot’s analysis things have changed, and the study of the Haitian Revolution has proceeded by leaps and bounds. As Nadège N. Clitandre has shown, however, to focus on Haiti solely for its revolutionary importance risks a reductive silencing of the totality of Haitian history and culture, as if Haiti is important only because of its Revolution and as if Haiti exists only in a frozen and isolated moment of triumph that is now more than two centuries old (2011, 2020). In an effort to resist this exceptional framing of Haiti, which presents a similar intellectual challenge to the reduction of ancient Greece to ‘the Greek miracle’ of 5th century BCE Athens or ancient Rome to a ‘Golden Age’, this book will study Haitian literature from Independence to the twenty-first century. Although the Revolution was the dominant event in Haitian culture for the first generations of its existence as an independent nation, other issues have been foregrounded by Haitian artists and writers throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. In addition to the legacy of the Revolution, Haitian authors have been processing and reacting to the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), the horrors of Duvalierism (1957–1986), population migrations and the Haitian

14  Introduction Diaspora, and movements toward stability in the realms of politics, economics and climate justice. Interdisciplinary Foundation II: Why Ancient Greece and Rome Matter The cultures of ancient Greece and Rome were vibrant and innovative, and much of their enduring legacy is richly deserved. But that legacy also demands scrutiny, because notions such as the ‘Greek Miracle’ or the ‘Golden Age of Rome’ come to us with labels that convey predetermined value judgments, and we should ask who made those judgments and on what basis. This issue persists in the name given to the academic study of ancient Greece and Rome: Classics. This name is unusual among anglophone academic disciplines for being value-based rather than descriptive (compare such field names as chemistry, business or American Literature). We can quickly account for much of the prestige afforded to ‘Classics’ by recognizing three points. First and most simply, these ancient civilizations had habits of creating cultural material that was built to last – from marble statues, to writing that could be preserved on papyrus or stone to building projects that remain visible (or are accessible to archaeological excavation) today. Second, creative artists from antiquity to today have found this material engaging, inspiring and useful. This means that there has been an active and continuous tradition of preserving and engaging with material from ancient Greece and Rome. Many of the best known and most frequently discussed examples of this tradition have reiterated a cultural continuity between these ancient cultures and Europe or the U.S., such as Michelangelo’s masterpieces inspired by Greco-Roman statuary, James Joyce’s Ulysses or the architectural features of the U.S. Capitol. More recently, artists who do not identify with European or so-called Western cultures have created a welter of engagements with ancient Greece and Rome that not only perpetuate the ‘classical tradition’ but also critique and resist its associations with coloniality. Examples of artists who have engaged with ‘classical’ material include such high-profile figures as Nobel Prize winners Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott, but this only scratches the surface.29 Other twenty-first century artists who have worked in this vein include: U.S. hip-hop star Lizzo, CanadianLebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad, Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie, Kenyan visual artist Wangechi Mutu, filmmaker Spike Lee, and Chinese sculptors Li Hongbo and Xu Zhen.30 Third, and most problematically, the evocative and inspiring cultural artifacts of ancient Greece and Rome became an ideological and educational pillar of European imperial expansion across much of the entire inhabited world. These two themes of European history – colonization projects that eventually encircled the globe and an intensified idealization of ancient Greece and Rome – came together at the same historical moment. The ‘Age of Exploration’, exemplified most dramatically by Christopher Columbus’ transatlantic voyage of 1492, coincided with the burgeoning of the Italian Renaissance. In Italy, antiquities were re-discovered that revolutionized artistic tastes (e.g., the Belvedere Apollo was found in 1489 and

Introduction  15 Laocoön and His Sons in 1506) and new masterpieces were created in the classical style (e.g., Michelangelo’s David was completed in 1504 and Rafael’s School of Athens in 1511). As Europeans explored and laid claim to new territories, they were experiencing a continent-wide rush of enthusiasm for connections with the ‘classical’ world. This historical coincidence surely informed Columbus’ claims about Caribbean Cyclopes and dog-headed cynocephali – creatures familiar from the ancient Greek imaginary.31 Once the Columbian Exchange was up and running, the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome could also be advanced by silencing potential rivals. An egregious example of this arose when Spanish explorers encountered the large and diverse Mayan literature and responded by ordering a coordinated book burning of these now lost cultural treasures.32 As Mayan literature went up in flames, Catholic missionaries were teaching Latin to Maya children in newly established colonial schools. In this situation, the literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were promoted while Mayan literature was forcibly stamped out.33 These examples show how oppressive the relationship between classical education and coloniality could (and can) be, but the hacking of classical forms represents a methodological alternative. For example, Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), who was taken from Africa to serve as a slave in the U.S., weakened the ideology of racialized colonialism by mastering and remixing classical poetry to produce her own verses that were so impressive and so deeply engaged with classical themes that she caused a major controversy involving the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Her skill at manipulating the rhetoric and imagery of classical learning represented a major challenge to assumptions of white intellectual superiority and the acceptability of the slave system of the U.S.34 If one accepts the narrative that Greco-Roman antiquity properly belongs to Europe, then Wheatley’s efforts to hack the script of classical poetry can seem like a misguided exercise in assimilation rather than liberation. But if we follow the lead of Mazrui in understanding an act of ‘cultural piracy’ that preceded ‘territorial annexation’, then Wheatly’s poetry represents a step towards rebalancing that ledger. The Haitian authors studied in this volume participate in this same cultural reappropriation, except that Mazrui’s sequence has to be reversed. The Haitian Revolution afforded the territory within which the formerly colonized subjects of Saint-Domingue could pursue the project of cultural decolonization. The First Two Independent Nations in the Americas Because Haiti and ancient Greece and Rome matter in these ways, the intersection of these two cultural spaces becomes worthy of closer consideration. And because Haiti and the United States have a particularly intimate relationship that will become critical in the latter chapters of this book, the intertwined histories of the first two independent nations in the Americas deserve closer scrutiny as well. These countries share origin-stories built around the revolutionary rejection of European colonialism, but their narratives soon diverged. The U.S. grew into the largest economic and military power in the world, whereas Haiti has become a primary example of how a nation can be hampered by neocolonial wealth extraction. These

16  Introduction contrasting histories came into open conflict during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), which drastically impacted the careers of the authors studied in the middle three chapters of this book and which indirectly contributed to the rise of Duvalierism, which dominates the tone of the final three chapters. In 1791, the United States defeated the English crown, becoming the first European colony to win its independence in the western hemisphere. That same year, at a semi-legendary ceremony in the mountains of French Saint-Domingue, a group of revolutionaries swore allegiance to each other and to the cause of rising up against a brutally oppressive colonial economy built upon the agricultural labor of enslaved Africans. This event, the Bois Caïman ceremony, traditionally represents the first step of an insurrectionist movement that would chart a twisting, and at times lurching, path toward the Haitian Declaration of Independence on January 1, 1804. On this day, Haiti became the second independent nation in the Americas, the first Black Republic, and the first modern nation founded upon a rejection of the enslavement of fellow humans. Late in this transitional period, when Toussaint Louverture, Haiti’s most famous Revolutionary leader, had asserted control over Saint-Domingue (though without declaring independence from France) and put an end to slavery in the colony, U.S. President John Adams agreed to a trade agreement with Louverture and a military pact that opposed privateering in the region. For several years it seemed that the regional neighbors might become true allies.35 Yet these triumphal moments that link the United States and Haiti through their parallel resistance to European colonization look strikingly different just a few years later. By 1803, the abolitionist-minded Adams had been succeeded by the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson, and Louverture had fallen from power and was dying in a French prison. In that year, the fortunes of the U.S. were looking up, even as the Revolutionary army in Saint-Domingue (now led by the independenceminded Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Alexandre Pétion) was facing a last-ditch, genocidal plan on the part of France to preserve its colonial holdings. Just as the U.S. and Haiti are linked positively through their nineteenth-century wars of independence, so too are their sharply contrasting, early twentieth-century histories linked. In Haiti, the colonial era transitioned seamlessly and immediately into a series of neocolonial challenges, whereas the U.S. quickly became a partner with European powers in defending and expanding its sphere of influence. The best example of these contrasting histories came in 1803, when the U.S. doubled in size through the Louisiana Purchase. Napoleonic France was desperate for cash, and the fledgling U.S. already made an apt trading partner, particularly through the personal connections of such figures as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (who spent parts of their careers in France) and the Marquis de Lafayette and the Comte de Grasse (who lent decisive military support in the American Revolution). Both parties came away from the Louisiana Purchase in an advantageous position, since France received a major infusion of money and the U.S. acquired massive new territories, including most of the Missouri and Mississippi River watersheds. The first independent nation in the Western Hemisphere was doing well. But why was France in such pressing need for an infusion of funds? Part of the answer, to be sure, can be found in Napoleon’s European campaigns and his

Introduction  17 vision for regional hegemony. But the most acute pinch came from the fact that a massive armada, led by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, had just been obliterated in Saint-Domingue. Strategic missteps on the part of the French, a revolutionary army familiar with the territory and fighting for its life, and a brutal episode of yellow-fever that ravaged the French forces unacclimated to the Caribbean all contributed to the French defeat.36 In one of Leclerc’s last moves to salvage his mission, he wrote to Napoleon and suggested a plan to make the best of a disastrous situation: ‘We must destroy all the blacks in the mountains – men and women – and spare only the children under twelve years of age. We must destroy half of those in the plains and must not leave a single colored person in the colony who has worn an epaulette.’37 These words were written a month before Leclerc died of yellow fever in November of 1802, and his envisioned genocidal purge was left to his successor, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, the son of the general whose valiance had saved the American Revolutionaries at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. Whereas the elder Rochambeau had fought for the American Colonies’ independence and against the English monarch in that earlier conflict, the son’s legacy in Saint-Domingue is wholesale slaughter in the service of colonialism. But it was too little, too late, and by November 1803, Leclerc’s genocidal plan and Rochambeau’s efforts to carry out that plan had ended in a devastating French defeat. It was this failed attempt to re-establish colonial control through the strategic deployment of mass murder that left Napoleonic France looking for money and put the U.S. in a position to benefit from the historically advantageous windfall of the Louisiana Purchase.38 In the next decades, both the United Kingdom and France looked again toward their former colonial holdings. But whereas the U.S., expanding into the Louisiana territories and reaping the benefits of its own slave-driven agricultural economy, again defeated British forces in the War of 1812, the upshot of which has been a close alliance between the two countries ever since, Haiti suffered a crushing blow in 1825 without a shot being fired. In that year, King Charles X sent a naval force of fourteen ships into Port-au-Prince harbor and compelled Haitian President JeanPierre Boyer to sign a massive indemnity of 150 million francs, a figure designated to compensate France for the losses it incurred during the Haitian Revolution. The original terms stipulated that the full sum would be paid to France in five annual installments, but the sheer size of the indemnity necessitated a cycle of subsequent loans, which extended and increased the overall impact of the obligation, and the debt was not completely paid off until 1947. This fiscal burden, which required formerly enslaved people to pay their former masters for lost revenue, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 1, but suffice it to say for the moment that this indemnity gutted Haiti’s plans for internal development and forced the young nation to borrow even more money from France just to make the initial interest payment. As the U.S. flourished, buoyed up by the Louisiana Purchase and victory in the War of 1812, Haiti languished under this neocolonial fiscal burden. A century later, with the U.S. asserting more regional control under the auspices of the Monroe Doctrine, these first two independent nations in the Americas fell into a more openly antagonistic relationship as the U.S. took over the remainder of the indemnity owed to France and in 1915 began a military occupation of Haiti that would

18  Introduction last until 1934. A generation of Haitian (indeed Caribbean) intellectuals, several of whom are studied in the chapters to come, sharpened their anti-colonial ideals in reaction to this occupation. As I  was writing this book, the U.S. media has covered the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and the devastation wrought by a major earthquake in 2021. The typical tone of paternalizing dismay at the nation’s bad luck in terms of environmental disasters (the region experiences frequent earthquakes and hurricanes) and economic instability can, for audiences who do not understand Haiti’s history, seem to confirm U.S. President Donald Trump’s offensive comment that Haiti is one of several ‘shithole countries’.39 But the recent publication of shocking images at the U.S.-Mexico border of mounted Border Patrol agents appearing to run down hungry and desperate asylum seekers from Haiti offers a blunt reminder of the power differentials that have shaped the contrasting histories of these two countries. The U.S., which in a little more than a century grew into a world power, benefitted enormously from easy relations with European powers, a booming agricultural economy powered by enslaved laborers until its Civil War (and a racialized underclass afterward), and the natural resources offered by territories that soon stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Haiti’s prospects, by contrast, were hobbled in the nation’s infancy by France’s predatory presence and the policy of the U.S., which, aside from John Adam’s brief alliance with Toussaint Louverture, most often served to stymie Haitian opportunities for development. The now infamous image of the Border Patrol agent on a horse running down a Haitian man clinging to a plastic bag of food is not a momentary anomaly but, rather, a retrospective on the entire history of the first two nations in the Americas to free themselves from European colonial control. Organization and Outline of This Book The following chapters offer discrete studies, organized chronologically, of texts composed between 1822 and 2010 by authors born in Saint-Domingue or Haiti. In terms of genre and tone, they range from a diplomatic letter from a head of state to ethnographic studies, novels and playscripts. Each chapter requires its own contextualization, but they also fall into three relatively discrete groups. For this reason, the book is organized into three sections, each with a brief ‘historical segue’ offering a quick overview of the era followed by three chapters. A coda concludes the whole study that combines summary reflections and suggestions for further work. The first section deals with 19th century texts, all of which give pride of place to the Haitian Revolution. The ‘historical segue’ traces a few important themes that had shaped Haiti from 1804 to 1822, when President Jean-Pierre Boyer penned a letter of support to leaders of the Greek War of Independence. This brief text is the centerpiece of Chapter 1, which unpacks Boyer’s handling of two approaches to the legacy of ancient Greek political autonomy. With this alternative understandings of modern relationships to ancient Greece, one based on shared ethnicity and geography, the other on a shared opposition to despotism and tyranny, Boyer

Introduction  19 presents Haiti as something of a well-intentioned older sibling to the Greek independence movement. The chapter ends with a contrast between the inclusive tone of Boyer’s letter and Shelley’s famous rallying cry, also crafted in 1822, that ‘we are all Greeks.’ Chapter 2 focuses on Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859), the first novel composed by a Haitian author. Bergeaud retells the story of the Haitian Revolution by reconfiguring the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus, who now symbolize the leadership of the two racially distinguishable populations that cooperated to bring down French Saint-Domingue. Romulus stands for Louverture and Dessalines, leaders of the black forces, and Remus represents André Rigaud and Pétion, who oversaw the mixed-race contingent. Bergeaud effects a surprising counter-reading to the founding myth of Rome by having his Haitian Romulus decide not to kill his brother, a choice that presents the Revolution as a triumph of racial harmony for the new nation. Bergeaud’s vision of racial harmony re-appears in an academic tone and with a global perspective in Chapter 3. Anténor Firmin’s L’égalité des races humaines (The Equality of the Human Races, 1885) is a far-reaching anthropological study of race that both directly rebuts Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853–1855) and presents Haiti as the heir not to ancient Greece but, rather, to ancient and black Egypt. Firmin, who had deep training in Classics, builds many of his arguments about Egypt through references to Greek and Roman history and literature, and his citational habit effectively boxes in white supremacist scholars, who were arguing forcefully for the whiteness of ancient Egyptians. Either they must discount the prestige and authority of Firmin’s Greek witnesses to the blackness of ancient Egyptians or they must concede his points. After positioning Egypt as the black ancestor of Greek greatness, he then argues that Haiti is fast emerging as the second great black civilization and a book-end to ancient Egypt. The second section transitions to the twentieth century up to the rise of François Duvalier, and the ‘historical segue’ maps two shifts that play out in the next set of three chapters: a decreased emphasis on the Revolution in favor of more contemporary issues, especially the rising influence of the U.S., which would invade and occupy Haiti in 1915, and a shift away from idealizations of the Revolutionary past and toward the lived realities of the Haitian population, especially in terms of the Creole language and Vodou religion. Fernand Hibbert’s satirical novella Romulus deflates the grandiosity of Bergeaud’s use of Romulus, and Chapter 4 studies this new iteration of Rome’s founding hero, who emerges as a caricature of a typical, rather than heroic, Haitian police chief who gets caught up in the tragically flawed Liberal Insurrection of 1883 that sought to bring down the regime of Haitian President Lysias Salomon. This new Romulus inhabits a world populated by people with names from the Greco-Roman past, and his story, while not founding a new nation, is revolutionary in its own way for incorporating gently mocking bits of Vodou ritual and Creole language, topics that had largely been ignored by Haitian authors. All gentle mocking goes away in Chapter 5, which deals with Jean-Price Mars’ ethnographic manifesto calling on the francophone Haitian elite to embrace the

20  Introduction nation’s African heritage, especially through Creole and Vodou. To make his arguments, Price-Mars’ Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle, 1928) inverts the typical associations with the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome. Instead of following Firmin in suggesting that Haiti is living up to the high cultural standards of antiquity, Price-Mars draws on the realia of the Greco-Roman past to show that the Haitian peasantry is much like the peasantries of the ancient Mediterranean. Price-Mars’ challenge seems to be answered by Félix Morisseau-Leroy, who staged a thoroughly Haitianized version of the myth of Antigone in 1953. Composed entirely in Creole and in a Vodou idiom, Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn sought to demonstrate the verbal power and literary potential of Creole, and the canonical standing of Sophocles’ Antigone offered an apt challenge. As the prologue to the play makes explicit, Morisseau-Leroy has replaced the Greek gods with Vodou lwa (spirits) and this change of spiritual worldview leads to a reframing of Antigone’s theatrical fate. His Haitian response to the Greek canon replaces the blunt trauma of the young woman’s death with a vision of transcendence made possible by Vodou. The third ‘historical segue’ charts the rise of Duvalierism and its impact on Haitian literature and culture. From the election of François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier in 1957 to the ouster of his son, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, in 1986, the Duvaliers oversaw a necropolitical regime of terror in the name of black nationalism that drove millions of Haitians to flee the country.40 Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn now seemed to prefigure Duvalier’s rise, and with his play taking on newly subversive implications he left the country in 1959 for West Africa. That same year, Windsor Klebert Laferrière, the father of novelist Dany Laferrière, also left Haiti. In 1976, Dany emigrated to Canada, and in 1981 the young Edwidge Danticat joined her parents in the U.S., several years after they, too, had escaped Duvalierism. The final three chapters deal with these authors as members of the Haitian diaspora, whose engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity have little to do with the glories of the Haitian Revolution and say far more about twentieth-century totalitarianism. All three also connect the Duvaliers’ penchant for desecrating the bodies of their enemies with the myth of Antigone, already made Haitian by Morisseau-Leroy. Chapter 7 again focuses on Morisseau-Leroy, as his Antigòn became increasingly political in retrospect, especially in a performance in 1963 in Ghana and in a short Creole poem by the same name published in 1972. In this poem, the first-person voice speaks directly to Antigòn about her habit of dying again and again not only on stage and but also in the streets, an allusion to Papa Doc’s theft of the corpse of his rival Clément Jumelle. Such cyclical violence is at the core of Morisseau-Leroy’s 1978 play Wa Kreyon (King Kreyon), composed in Senegal and explicitly addressing the Duvalierist use of state violence to terrorize the population. As in the 1953 play, Vodou offers the medium for the climax, as the spiritual power (tèt mèt) that has been controlling Kreyon/Papa Doc is transferred to Emon/ Baby Doc. Laferrière’s Le cri des oiseaux fous (The Cry of Mad Birds, 2000) is a novel about the narrator’s last day in Haiti, immediately after the killing of his friend Gasner Raymond in 1976. As shown in Chapter 8, Antigone re-appears as an inset play (partially the Sophoclean version; partially that of Morisseau-Leroy) that

Introduction  21 allows Laferrière to display the political potency of the arts, not so much in the immediate toppling of a dictator but as a spur to resistance. His narrator discusses and watches Antigone, but he himself is more of a Ulysses figure, and his departure from Haiti is achieved through a pairing of the Greek wanderer and the Vodou lwa Legba, who oversees transitions and controls gateways between realms. The final chapter, the only one to focus primarily on a female author, is coauthored with Julia Nelson Hawkins.41 We begin with Danticat’s own meditation on Antigone in an essay published in 2010. As she connects the Greek mythical character to the public execution of two anti-Duvalier insurgents in 1964, she issues a challenge to ‘create dangerously’. We then turn to her novel The Farming of Bones (1998) in which she does just that in her retelling of the 1937 Parsley Massacre in which Dominican soldiers carried out a genocidal purge by slaughtering thousands of Haitians along the countries’ shared border in a racial cleansing ordered by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Whereas all the texts discussed up to this point drew overt and explicit connections with Greco-Roman antiquity, we argue that Danticat takes aim at the oppressive panoply of patriarchy, coloniality and imperialism by echoing the Roman poetry of Virgil in an anti-epic and anticanonical register. Notes on Spelling and Capitalization Many words and names that appear in these pages can be spelled in various ways. The most famous hero of the Haitian Revolution, for example, spelled his chosen surname without an apostrophe, and I accept his spelling of Louverture, though his name is frequently spelled l’Ouverture. Whenever I quote someone else’s words, I  follow their spellings, and in my own voice I  aim for consistent clarity. Thus, I write Antigone when referring to the Greek mythological character and Antigòn when discussing her Haitianized counterpart (and similarly for other figures in that mythical cycle, such as Creon/Kreyon). Following the preponderance of recent usages, I refer to the Haitian language as Creole, rather than Kreyol or kreyòl, and the uniquely Haitian religion as Vodou, rather than Voodoo, Vaudou, Vaudaux or Vodun. Wherever possible I have printed updated Creole orthography though many older texts contain idiosyncratic forms. When printing ancient Greek, I  provide transliterations when discussing specific words but longer passages are printed in the ancient Greek alphabet; all non-English passages are translated into English. Other issues are more involved. I have chosen, for example, not to refer to the United States as ‘America’ or to use the adjectival ‘American’ when referring to the country or its inhabitants. Instead, and somewhat awkwardly, I use U.S. as both a noun and an adjective and reserve the words America and American for references to the wider region, often referred to as the Americas. In terms of racialized color labels, I do not capitalize black or white in order to avoid essentializing and to put the category of mixed-race individuals, so important to Haitian history, on a similar footing. And except in citations, I do not use the terms ‘mulatto/a’ or ‘yellow’, both formerly acceptable descriptors for Haitians of mixed racial identities.

22  Introduction Notes 1 This comment comes from the first essay in Danticat’s Create Dangerously (2010), which is analyzed in Chapter 9. 2 The demography of Saint-Domingue is complex, but at this level of analysis, we can note that in addition to free whites (the grand blancs or land-owners and the petit blancs, who were economically inferior) and enslaved blacks there were also significant numbers of free blacks (whether having been freed from slavery or born free) and mixed-race people. These latter groups were certainly not homogenous, but they were united in being denied the full rights of French citizenship and political access enjoyed by whites. 3 The classical tradition and Haiti intersect predominantly through the French influence of 18th century classical educational and neoclassical aesthetics. Useful overviews of these topics are provided by Ford 2010 and Kaminski 2010. 4 Bergeaud’s novel Stella, which includes this comment, is studied in Chapter 2. 5 As explained at the end of the Introduction in more detail, I do not capitalize racialized color words, in part to avoid essentializing those categories and in part to offer an equitable presentation of the mixed-race demographic, which is so important to Haitian history. 6 Fanon’s title, Les damnés de la terre, comes from Jacques Roumain’s poem ‘Nouveau sermon nègre’ (‘New black sermon’, published in Senghor 1948, 119–120), which includes the lines Debout les damnés de la terre / Debout les forçats de la faim, ‘Arise the damned of the earth, arise the conscripts of hunger’. 7 The relationship between Haiti and the U.S. has rarely been as good as one might have hoped for two nations that earned their independence by defeating European colonial powers. There was, however, a brief period when better relations seemed possible and mutually advantageous while John Adams was President in the U.S. and when Louverture had consolidated control of Saint-Domingue. For this relationship, see Johnson 2014. 8 Roynon 2003 uses Morrison’s concept of the pitfalls of orphanization as one of its guiding principles. 9 Walcott plays with the phonic similarity between French mer, ‘sea,’ and mère, ‘mother,’ as well as the meaning of os as ‘bone’ in Latin, French and patois. Greenwood 2020, 31–37 discusses the imagery of bones in Walcott’s poem and this passage, and Andújar 2022 more broadly discusses the resignification of Homer throughout the Caribbean. 10 On the history and problems of finding an ‘Athens of the Caribbean’, see Peralta 2020 (focusing on the Dominican Republic, which has also posed as a new Sparta) and Greenwood 2010, 186–225 (focusing on Trinidad). 11 I am grateful to Joseph for sharing this portion of his unpublished script with me. 12 As described at https://hack.osu.edu/ 13 Although she does not discuss this passage, Greenwood 2020 offers an important analysis of Philip’s engagement with ancient Greek and Roman material. 14 This moment of toga resistance is discussed in more detail in Chapter 9. 15 Neither European Pantheon was originally used in this way, but by the time of Haitian independence, both functioned in this capacity. 16 Such debates continue into the present, as seen in the ethnographic study by Geller and Marcelin whose interviews with residents of Milot show that there has never been a ‘singular or stable’ understanding of the significance of the palace (2020, 52). Their research includes a range of vibrant details, such as the regular use of the palace grounds for young lovers and Vodou rituals. 17 Daut 2017 offers a deep and brilliant assessment of Vastey’s life and his role in early Haitian history.

Introduction  23 18 . . . construits par les descendans des affricains, démontrent que nous avons conserve le goût et le génie de nos ancêtres pour l’architecture; eux qui ont couvert de leurs superbes monumens, l’Éthiopie, l’Égypte, Carthage et la vieille Espagne! 19 For a broader discussion of Basquiat’s engagement with ancient Greek and Roman cultures, see Connolly 2018. 20 The phrase ‘live free or die’ has a rich history. Written in English, it recalls the motto of New Hampshire, the U.S. state, but the French version (vivre libre ou mourir) was a popular slogan in that nation’s revolution. Legend has it that Dessalines hacked this phrase – calling out its hypocrisy in the service of colonial, slave-owning France, while also asserting the appropriateness of the phrase to a Haitian context – in 1804 when he is remembered as having ripped the white section out of the French flag in order to create the Haitian flag by removing its whiteness. 21 Mignolo and Walsh (2018, 3) develop the concept of re-existence as ‘the redefining and resignifying of life in conditions of dignity.’ 22 Whereas the opening salvos of the American and French Revolutions were chronicled in detail by contemporary witnesses (often from multiple perspectives), the Bois Caïman ceremony of 1791 was not documented in a manner that easily conforms to the standards of Euro-American academic research. This has allowed Hoffman (1992, 267–301) to argue that the event may be purely mythical, and Geggus (2002) and Dubois (2004b, 102), who believe that the event did take place, to admit that many key historical questions must be left unanswered (e.g., was Toussaint Louverture present? are the preserved scripts of speeches, prayers and oaths accurate?). Within Haiti, oral Vodou traditions insist on the historical reality of Bois Caïman, as documented by Beauvoir-Dominique et al., 2000. 23 The Haitian Revolution was not, however, the first attempt to dismantle colonial control of the Caribbean. For important antecedents among British colonies, see Sharples 2020, and for French colonies, especially Guadaloupe and Saint-Domingue, see Dubois 2004a. 24 Of the various constraints placed upon the colonies by the crown, U.S. curricular mythology foregrounds the issue of taxation, most often focalized through the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Recent trends, however, point to colonial resistance in other areas, especially the growing support for the abolition of slavery in Great Britain and King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 limiting the colonies’ freedom to expand into the Indian territories west of the U.S. colonies. Examples of such work include Holton 2021, Dunbar-Ortiz 2014. 25 Cooper’s dissertation, completed at the Sorbonne, is titled L’Attitude de la France à l’Égard de l’Esclavage Pendant la Révolution. For English translation and discussion, see Cooper 2006. 26 Readers unfamiliar with the Haitian Revolution would do well to start with Popkin 2012 as a succinct encapsulation and C. L. R. James’ foundational The Black Jacobins (1963). Other key contributions to this field include: Dubois 2004b, Fick 1990, Geggus 2001 and 2014, Girard 2011, Jensen 2011, and Popkin 2007 and 2010. 27 The violent struggle between 1791 and 1804 has not always been labelled ‘the Haitian Revolution’. Popkin (2018, 246 n6) discusses the development of that term in English and French, in Haiti, France and the wider Francophone and Anglophone worlds. The ‘Age of Revolutions’ has recently been interrogated from different regional perspectives, as seen in Sivasundaram 2021 and Armitage and Subrahmanyam 2009. 28 Fitting with Popkin’s comment, focusing on the Haitian Revolution but discussing Derrida’s concept of the ‘supplement’ more broadly, that ‘the addition of the supplement of 1804 to the familiar dates of 1776 and 1789 puts into question traditional narratives about the origins of modern freedom’ (2018, 233). 29 Although their engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity are not limited to these texts, the most often discussed points of contact include Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973 debut), Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Walcott’s Omeros (1990).

24  Introduction 30 Lizzo’s video for the song ‘Rumors’ (2021) contains a variety of classical images; Mouawad’s Oedipal Incendies enjoyed success on stage (2003) and as a film (2010); Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) used the myth of Antigone as a framework for a story about the cultural challenges of migration; Mutu’s The Seated, a 2019 series of sculptures, speak back to the classical form of the Caryatid; Lee’s Chi-Raq (2015) adapts Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to address gang violence in Chicago; Li’s mobile paper sculptures include busts of Heracles (2012), Agrippa (2014) and Laocoon (2015); Xu’s work includes the kinetic sculpture of a Greek column that moves like a snake (Hello, 2019) and a range of sculptures in which Greek and Chinese classical sculptures are recreated and joined at the neck. 31 In his journal entry from November 4, 1492, Christopher Columbus records that he went ashore on what is now known as Cuba. In his conversation with the local inhabitants, he heard that ‘far away, there were men with one eye, and others with dog’s noses who were cannibals, and that when they captured an enemy they beheaded him and drank his blood’. On the 26th, he was told that ‘the Canibas had only one eye and dogs’ faces’. Text following Markham 1893. 32 For a thorough assessment of case the of Mayan literature, see Tedlock 2011. 33 Similar scenarios played out in schools set up for native American students across Canada and the U.S., in which traditional languages were forbidden and English, at times also Latin, was requisite. Howe finds benevolence in this, since ‘missionaries among Native American people taught Latin as well as English in their schools, hoping to prepare some of the students to go to college’ (2011, 32). Classicist Craig Williams is currently preparing a monograph on indigenous North American authors and their relationship to Greco-Roman antiquity, which promises to be more balanced in its assessment. 34 For more on Phillis Wheatley’s poetry and life, see Cook and Tatum 2010, 7–48; Greenwood 2011; Hairston 2013, 25–64. 35 For this relationship, see Johnson 2014. 36 For the role of yellow fever in the Haitian Revolution, see Snowden 2019, 111–139. 37 Quoted by Dubois 2004b, 291–292. 38 For recent discussions of the Louisiana Purchase, see Bush 2014, Dillon and Drexler 2016, and Gleijeses 2016. 39 Trump’s comments were made in the Oval Office on January 11, 2018, as reported by Josh Dawsey in The Washington Post (among many other sources). Ibram X. Kendi offered important commentary on Trump’s words in Kendi 2019. 40 Necropolitics, a politics rooted in the state-sponsored killings of certain groups or people, is Achille Mbembe’s extension of Foucauldian biopolitical theory. Prior to coining this term, he discussed the framework of what would become necropolitics in terms that were explicitly Haitian (2001, 83): ‘. . . new institutions charged with administering violence’ across Africa have ‘reached such a point that it is no longer excessive to speak of “tonton-macoutization”.’ He then articulated the framework of necropolitics in Mbembe 2003 and greatly expanded the idea in Mbembe 2019. 41 Haitian literary history, and the educational system that undergirds that history, is no different from so many literary traditions in that it has long been dominated by male authors (and students and teachers). Danticat is certainly not the first prominent female Haitian author – Ida Faubert (1883–1969) and Marie Vieux-Chauvet (1916–1973) are important predecessors – but her writings engage more deeply the themes of this volume.

Historical Segue 1

1804–1822 Saturn’s Children

Citizens: It is not enough to have expelled from your country the barbarians who have bloodied it . . .1 Readers coming to this book from the field of Classics might hear in these words a dramatization of a moment from ancient Greek or Roman oratory. The contrast between citizens, the inner circle of politically enfranchised members of a polity, and barbarians, the dangerously ‘uncivilized’ antithesis of citizen-based politics, is rooted in Greco-Roman theory and language (citizen derives from Latin civitas, ‘city’, and barbarian comes from the Greek onomatopoetic word barbaros).2 Experts in Caribbean history, meanwhile, surely recognize the opening address to the people of Haiti from the Declaration of Independence issued on January  1, 1804 by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who had been born into slavery in Saint-Domingue (or, according to some sources, he may have been born in Africa) and became the first leader of independent Haiti, but it may be less widely recognized that this gambit has close parallels in classical oratory. For example, Lysias, who had built a successful career as a non-citizen resident of Athens, delivered a speech at Olympia in the 380’s BCE in which he alludes to the Greco-Persian Wars (490–479, BCE) by evoking his audience’s ‘ancestors, who deprived those barbarians [barbaroi], lusting for the land of others, even of their own territory and who, by driving out tyrants, established a universal freedom for all’ (33.6).3 Centuries later, in March of 43 BCE Cicero, who was desperately trying to save the Roman Republic from becoming an empire, attacked Mark Antony with similar rhetoric: ‘Who was ever such a barbarian [barbarus], so monstrous, so savage? . . . He destroys the fields of the best citizens; this most shameful enemy threatens all good people with crosses and torture’ (Philippics 13.9).4 The barbarian, a flexible composite of stereotypes standing in opposition to the idealization of a ‘civilized’ citizen, was the ultimate boogieman who could, in good times, be spurned as an impotent savage but who, in less stable periods, threatened the order of the cosmos. Amid that same transition from Republic to Empire, the Roman poet Horace worried that a barbarus . . . victor, a ‘barbarian conqueror’ (Epodes 16.11), might burn Rome to the ground.5 The Haitian Declaration of Independence, that is, engages with a very ancient ethnocentric discourse about the need to protect hearth and home from the threat of the barbarian Other.6 In so doing, Dessalines hacks the script of colonial ideology and deploys an anti-colonial classical rhetoric. DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-2

26  1804–1822 The opposition of citizen and barbarian in the founding document of independent Haiti represents a powerful overthrowing of colonial norms in two ways. The first and more obvious point is that the Declaration of Independence, from its opening salvo, presents the European colonial powers, and France above all, as the barbarians to be feared. This pairing of Europe and barbarism is not rooted in theories of geography or race but, rather, in the historical record of (especially) French actions. They are the ones who, for all their Enlightenment ideals, reduced human beings to Cartesian automata through the fiscal logic of enslavement; they are the ones who unleashed genocidal generals like Rochambeau onto the battlefields of the late Revolution; and they are the ones who most directly threatened the land and liberty of the newly created state of Haiti. Yet prior to Haitian independence, most discussions about barbarism came from elite European sources that used that term to demarcate people or practices as barbarous, savage or uncivilized, as viewed from the European strictures of civilization. This habit can be traced back to the writings of Herodotus and Aristotle, among other ancient Greek writers, though they were not championing Europe, whiteness (in the modern racialized sense) or Christianity. Instead, they were centering Greekness in a few special places, such as Athens, Olympia, Delphi and Sparta, and their concept of barbarism can be plotted graphically in terms of one’s physical and cultural distance from such Hellenic centers.7 When, in the European Renaissance, the ‘golden nugget’ that was classical culture came into the possession of new powers, especially England and France, that idealization of a civilized Greece was shifted to new metropolitan centers, such as London and Paris.8 In this way, the Haitian Revolution culminated in a rhetorical upending of an exclusively Eurocentric control of the classical tradition as the new nation decried the threat of barbarous Europe. Once the din of battle had fallen silent, the ongoing process of the Revolution asserted new cultural battle lines, in part by reframing the classical discourse around the binary of the barbarian and the citizen. This passage of the Haitian Declaration of Independence that situates Haitians as citizens juxtaposed to French barbarians also builds upon Toussaint Louverture’s reputation for being the ‘Black Spartacus’. This image derives from a prediction made by Abbé Raynal (1713–1796) that a leader would arise among the enslaved people of the colonial world and wreak havoc upon the colonial system.9 In April 1796, as Louverture became an increasingly powerful figure in the colonial power structure, Étienne Laveaux, then governor of Saint-Domingue, publicly hailed him with his famous sobriquet, though the label may predate that event. Raynal’s vision of the rise of a ‘Black Spartacus’ emerged from his opposition to slavery, and Laveaux seems to have used the moniker supportively. That said, the Roman Spartacus was an enslaved gladiator from Thrace whose uprising ended in utter defeat with six thousand of his followers crucified along the Appian Way leading into Rome, and he was never put forward in Roman sources in such positive ways. Spartacus was regularly presented as a brave and effective leader, but he embodied the chaos that threatened the ‘civilized’ status of Rome.10 ‘Spartacus the barbarian’ (ὁ Σπάρτακος ὁ βάρβαρος, Diodorus Siculus, 38/39.21) was just the sort of barbarus victor that Horace had feared, and indeed some of those invested in

1804–1822  27 opposing Haitian independence or black liberation must have sensed such connotations in the nickname. Although the idea of a ‘Black Spartacus’ could be empowering, it also connoted Pyrrhic victories that would lead ultimately to defeat and the maintenance of the dominant social order.11 By 1804 (the year after Louverture’s death), it would have been ridiculous to present Dessalines as another ‘Black Spartacus’ for the simple fact that he had won. For this reason, the Declaration of Independence does not frame Haiti in terms of a slave uprising. Instead, it flips the cultural script and stations Dessalines as a political and ethical heir to those ancient Greek and Roman leaders who claimed to be bulwarks against the lurking barbarism of Persia, Egypt, Carthage, Gaul, Britain or, most elusively, domestic moral decay and subversion.12 Dessalines and his fellow citizens had triumphed against the colonial order, and their duty now was to remain vigilantly alert to threats from barbarous France. The rousing words of the Declaration of Independence from New Year’s Day 1804 can easily feel like the end of the story. Accordingly, a small mountain of scholarship has justifiably focused on the Revolution itself, and less attention has been paid to what happened next.13 Since the first text that I will analyze in detail was penned by President Jean-Pierre Boyer, it will be useful to sketch the political contours of the period from 1804 to 1825. Much of what went on in this period can be explained in terms of the interrelated goals of re-establishing domestic agricultural production after years of disruption and population decline caused by the Revolution and securing the nation from outside colonial threats, especially France. To address the twin concerns of the food supply and warding off any potential military threat from abroad, Dessalines first purged the new nation of its white population, ordering a massacre in early 1804, the size of which remains in dispute.14 Girard (2005a, 56) declares that ‘the massacres were as inexcusable as they were foolish’, a position supported primarily in terms of political strategy and expedience. Marlene Daut (2020a), who also lays heavy emphasis on the genocidal tactics of the French during the Revolution and their genocidal plans for Haiti after the Revolution, finds that the 1804 massacre has been vastly blown out of proportion, concluding that although Dessalines’ ‘policy did result in the deaths of a few hundred white soldiers and colonists over the course of four months, it did not even come close to killing the entire French population . . .’15 Deborah Jensen (2011, 81–121) takes a different approach in positioning Dessalines as a precursor to Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in understanding violence as a necessary step toward true decolonization, regardless of the actual number of its victims. Amid her analysis, she cites an official statement issued by Dessalines on February 15, 1804, in which he outlines his willingness to accept the title of emperor. In the edict, he invokes the image of an idol, which Jensen explains as a stand-in for slavery and the ‘larger sacralized field of Western prejudices and hierarchical values through which the French were actively attempting to subjugate the Haitians’ (97). Dessalines claims victory over that entire apparatus, ‘the idol at which we sacrificed’ (l’idole à laquelle nous sacrifions). In the next line, he amplifies this image: ‘That idol, like Saturn, devoured its children, and we have trampled it under our feet’ (Cette idole,

28  1804–1822 comme Saturne, dévorait ses enfants, et nous l’avons foulée aux pieds).16 This image of Saturn devouring his children, which reworks the famous quip of Jacques Mallet du Pan about the French Revolution, deserves closer scrutiny.17 Dessalines tightly interweaves several strands of cultural commentary in his claim that the slave system ‘devoured’ the enslaved people who powered it, but this is only the beginning. The Judeo-Christian language of idolatry is here activated in two contrasting but mutually reinforcing ways. On the one hand, Dessalines charges the French with promoting the worship of idols, a practice forbidden most starkly in the Biblical Ten Commandments. By calling the lucrative slave system a kind of idolatry, he specifically calls to mind the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf. If the French here play the part of the idolatrous Israelites, then the Haitians stand for the Levites, who both abstained from worshipping the Golden Calf and then, at Moses’ command, slaughtered those who had succumbed to the idol’s allure. On this reading, the Haitians who have overthrown the idols, emerge as the true heirs to Judeo-Christian virtue, and their violent purge was a necessary corrective in the larger divine narrative. A few months after issuing the edict that included the image of Saturn devouring his children, Dessalines made a similar rhetorical move in a speech to the people of Haiti by claiming to have defeated ‘the true cannibals’ and avenged America.18 Dessalines’ words may also convey a complementary message when we examine these religious alignments from another perspective. The patriarchal norms of colonial practice equate idolatry with the opposite of proper Christian comportment, much as the original barbarian was the opposite of the idealized GrecoRoman citizen. Within a Haitian context (at least from a European perspective), that alternative to Christianity can be found in Vodou. This statement grossly oversimplifies things, since Vodou brings together elements of Christianity and African spiritualism, but for the moment I will oppose the anti-Africanist strand of Christianity with the more syncretic Vodou. Kate Ramsey (2011, 31–42) discusses the early evidence for colonial regulation of non-Christian rituals and spiritualism in Saint-Domingue, including the first significant discussions of Vodou (or Vaudoux) in the writings of Saint-Méry in the 1780’s.19 From an Africanist perspective, however, the equation of Vodou with idolatry or misguided religion is backwards, and it is, rather, the European brand of Christianity that has revealed itself to be colonialist, imperialist, capitalist, dehumanizing and, in a nutshell, idolatrous. In this sense, the overthrowing of Christian idolatry has been achieved by the followers of Haitian Vodou in a Revolution that was remembered to have begun in 1791 with a Vodou ceremony and Vodou leadership. Such a rhetorical move fits with the description of European colonizers as barbarians in the Declaration of Independence. The cultural chauvinism of European civility, which can be traced directly back to discussions of the barbarians (barbaroi), in ancient Greek texts, such as the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places, is rejected in favor of an ethical determination of who behaves barbarically, rather than centering Europe as the racial, ethnic, Christian or geographic hub of the civilized world.20 But if European chauvinism had adopted a Greek pedigree, the interpretive openness of Greco-Roman imagery means that it can be marshalled in opposition

1804–1822  29 to whiteness as well. As Dessalines says that the idol of colonial enslavement is like Saturn devouring his children, he is aiming classical mythology, like the thunderbolt of Jupiter, at the heart of Eurocentrism. Saturn (or Cronus in Greek) was the Titan who, in order to prevent his children from overthrowing him, gobbled them down instead.21 Eventually, Jupiter (Zeus), the only child to escape this fate, forces Saturn to disgorge the swallowed children (who emerge unscathed), and this younger generation of Olympian gods wins control of the cosmos through their victory in the Titanomachy, or ‘War against the Titans’. Saturn, like the plantation master, is a failed father, whose regime becomes a monstrous impediment to progress. Both Saturn and the colonial slave masters tried to prevent their ‘children’ from growing up and naturally replacing them, and most Greek mythological sources stress that only with the triumph of the Olympians does justice become a force in the world. With French colonialism presented as Saturn devouring his children, the liberated population of Haiti emerges as a new Olympian order, with Dessalines, who lives on in the Vodou pantheon in the warrior spirit Ogoun Desalin, as the new Jupiter/Zeus.22 Bringing together these readings of Dessalines’ words in this edict, we can see that he situates the French as idol-worshippers who have fallen away from proper Judeo-Christian beliefs, or as followers of an idolatrous religion (Christianity) who have been defeated by the Africanist power of Vodou, or as Titans overthrown by Olympian divinities. Among these alternative or superimposable readings, Dessalines could be trumpeting a Christian rectitude (indeed, this is perhaps the easiest reading of his words about defeating idolatry) while also signaling more subtly an endorsement of Vodou. Furthermore, the many lwa or powerful spirits of Vodou can be aligned with the pantheon of Greco-Roman antiquity that was, despite its polytheism, a high-status cultural authority within European ideology. This last point will be reiterated later in this book in discussions of Émeric Bergeaud’s novel Stella and Félix Morisseau-Leroy’s Creole version of the story of Antigone. And finally, each interpretation of Dessalines’ words explored here offers justification of his massacre of white Europeans remaining in Haiti after independence. Idolworshippers and Titans are coded within their narrative worlds as deserving of the violent punishment they receive. To return to the historical overview of this period, Dessalines’ racial reckoning in 1804 was followed by the publication of a new Constitution in May 1805, which categorically rejected slavery and legally declared all citizens of Haiti to be black. Both points are remarkable. The former made Haiti the first modern nation to be established without the horrific taint of slavery, giving it good grounds to be viewed as the first anti-colonial state (a title to which the slightly older U.S. cannot lay claim given its involvement with racialized slavery and its treatment of indigenous nations); and the latter attempted to define out of existence the problem of ‘the racial epidermal schema’, as if the historical inequities that framed the relationship between the black and mixed-race citizens could be erased through a legislative ‘tabula rasa’.23 Although colorism continued to impact racial identifications within Haiti and did not end because of the Constitution’s racial categorization of all Haitians as black, this move sought to foster a more unified national identity.24

30  1804–1822 Having overseen a purge of the whites and structured a new constitution, Dessalines took the title of Jacques I, Emperor of Haiti. His administration largely followed the example of Louverture in building a strong military that could dissuade potential external enemies from invading while also forcing nearly all civilians to work on the plantations, most of which had been confiscated by the government with the overthrow of the French plantation owners. Michel-Rolph Trouillot provides the critical insight into the shortcomings of this system (and the charge can be extended to include Dessalines): ‘In retrospect, it is easy to see that the major weakness of Louverture’s party, and the fundamental contradiction of his regime, was the leadership’s failure to face the fact that the goal of unconditional freedom was incompatible with the maintenance of the plantation system . . .’ (1990, 43). This led to ‘a repressive labor system that Haitian historians have baptized caporalisme agraire (“militarized agriculture”)’. With no foreign allies to speak of and with the European colonial powers still jealously eyeing ‘the Pearl of the Antilles’, as Saint-Domingue had been known, Dessalines may have had no better option than to follow Louverture’s lead. Yet in doing so, he paid the price, became increasingly unpopular, and was assassinated on October 17, 1806, after less than three years in power. With Dessalines gone, the new nation split in two. Henri Christophe, who, like Dessalines, had emerged from enslavement to become a leader of the Revolution, stepped in as President of the State of Haiti in the north, and Alexandre Pétion, who had served under André Rigaud until taking over leadership of the primarily mixed-race faction during the Revolution, became the president of the Republic of Haiti in the south. This division threatened a return to the racial animosity that drove the War of the South (1799–1800, also known as the War of Knives) between Louverture and Rigaud who, like Christophe and Pétion, were leaders of the ‘black’ and ‘mixed’ contingents, respectively. Christophe and Pétion also had strikingly different political visions. Christophe continued the authoritarian caporalisme agraire of his predecessors, succeeded at establishing more favorable economic relations with England, and undertook a massive building campaign, witnessed most notably in the bastion of Laferrière and the Palais Sans-Souci (discussed in the Introduction). Pétion, by contrast, embraced the idealism of democracy (though also quickly adopting more authoritarian powers), redistributed land with hopes of economic egalitarianism, and gave refuge to Simón Bolivar in 1815 so that he might have a base for continuing his liberation efforts across South America. Both Haitian leaders also laid the foundations for an educational system, a national good in any circumstance but particularly necessary given that so many new Haitian citizens had been deprived of any educational opportunities because of slavery. Tensions between the north and south simmered until 1810, when Christophe and Pétion stabilized relations. At that point, Christophe declared himself to be Henry I, King of Haiti, and both he and Pétion maintained their positions until their deaths. The fortunes of the two Haitis broadly diverged in this period. Christophe succeeded in stabilizing the economic situation by continuing to focus on sugar and coffee exports from massive plantations, though at the cost of becoming increasingly despised by his people, whereas Pétion was the more beloved but less

1804–1822  31 economically successful ruler, since his popular land redistributions led to subsistence farming rather than the growing of cash crops that would have energized the national economy. Pétion prepared for his succession by appointing Jean-Pierre Boyer to follow him, and a peaceful transition took place in 1818 upon Pétion’s death from yellow fever. Meanwhile, Christophe’s position became increasingly tenuous. With his health failing, he died by suicide in 1820 amid an uprising against him, and his son, designated to be his successor, was assassinated soon thereafter. At this point, Boyer took control of the north without bloodshed and reunited Haiti. Boyer’s presidency, which lasted from 1818 until his exile in 1843, encompassed some of the key events that would determine Haiti’s trajectory even into the current era. In addition to unifying the northern and southern portions of the country, he extended Pétion’s land reforms into the northern region, which led to a shift from export crops to subsistence farming.25 He also united the entire island of Hispaniola by annexing the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo in February 1822, a month after he wrote the text that forms the centerpiece of Chapter 1. The combination of a weakened Spanish presence and Simón Bolivar’s reputation led to the establishment of Spanish Haiti, a country that existed only from its declaration of independence in December 1821 until Boyer’s arrival in February of the following year. The unification of the island meant that Boyer’s administration had the opportunity to create a culturally and geographically unified nation. Slavery was now outlawed across the entire island and external threats could no longer attack by land. But few of Boyer’s policies achieved their goals, and the Haitian occupation of the eastern half of Hispaniola (1822–1844) ended soon after he left office. The two-decades effort to knit the various parties together left such enduring feelings of hostility on the Dominican side of the border that the 1937 Parsley Massacre (also known as El Corte, ‘the cutting’ in Spanish and kout kouto, ‘the stabbing’ in Haitian Creole), which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9, was partially justified as payback for Boyer’s occupation. And today, the Dominican Republic is the only nation in the Western hemisphere that celebrates its independence not from a European colonial power but from its neighbor. Notes 1 CITOYENS, Ce n’est pas assez d’avoir expulse de votre pays les barbares qui l’ont exsanglanté . . . Text and translation following Gaffield 2016, 240–241. Gaffield’s volume offers a trove of interpretations of this document. 2 Mathisen 2006 offers an incisive overview of this issue in a broad historical perspective. 3 προγόνους, οἳ τοὺς μὲν βαρβάρους ἐποίησαν τῆς ἀλλοτρίας ἐπιθυμοῦντας τῆς σφετέρας αὐτῶν στερεῖσθαι, τοὺς δὲ τυράννους ἐξελάσαντες κοινὴν ἅπασι τὴν ἐλευθερίαν κατέστησαν. 4 quis tam barbarus umquam, tam immanis, tam ferus? . . . agros divexat civium optimorum; hostis taeterrimus omnibus bonis cruces ac tormenta minitatur. Note that the Roman crux or cross was, first and foremost, a torture device before it ever took on Christian symbolism. 5 Horace published his collection of Epodes in 30 BCE, a year after Octavian (soon to be known as the Emperor Augustus) ended the Roman Civil Wars by defeating the combined forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII at the Battle of Actium in 31. Epodes

32  1804–1822

6 7

8 9

10 11

12

13 14

15 16 17

18

16 expresses Horace’s fear over the instability of the Civil Wars, but its publication date means that that fear is retrospective and articulated from a place of greater social stability. For more on the construction of the barbarian in ancient Greek and Roman sources, see Antonova 2018, 14–128, Grillo 2012, 106–130 and McCoskey 2012, passim but especially 35–67. A variation on this model plotted a territory of Greece (rather than specifically important sites) as the central region of a concentric system in which civilized standing could essentially be plotted in terms of the distance from this perfectly civilized center. For this idea see Sassi 2001, 101–103. The image of the ‘golden nugget’ is taken from Appiah 2016. Raynal and Diderot 1780, vol. 1, 545. It is attractive to accept the idea that Raynal’s prediction of an ‘avenger’ for the murderous excesses of colonialism inspired the young Louverture, but as Hazareesingh 2020 notes that the text ‘was not a call to arms to the black slaves, but primarily a warning to colonial authorities and slave-owning classes’ (33). For an updated discussion of Spartacus, see Schiavone 2013. Rock guitarist and progressive activist Tom Morello, whose Kenyan father participated in the Mau-Mau Uprising (1952–60), regularly plays a guitar inscribed with the words ‘Black Spartacus’. This, especially when paired with his other guitars that feature slogans such as ‘Arm the Homeless’, is clearly meant as an empowering rallying cry. Similarly progressive is the statement by a young Fidel Castro in a letter from prison in 1954 that ‘at a time when Napoleon was imitating Caesar, and France resembled Rome, the soul of Spartacus was reborn in Toussaint Louverture’ (cited in Franqui 1980, 76). From the perspective of ancient Greece and Rome, such European locales as Britain, Gaul (France) and Germany were thoroughly barbarous lands until Roman conquest brought them (somewhat) into the civilizing power of the empire. For just one example, Herodian, a 3rd century Roman historian, describes the Britons as barbarians (barbaroi) who swim in swamps, know nothing of clothing, and who value iron as highly as ‘other barbarians’ (hoi loipoi barbaroi) value gold (3.13.6–8). Dubois 2012, Gaffield 2015, Girard 2005a, 55–75, Gonzalez 2019, Hector and Hurbon 2009, and Trouillot 1990 all address this period in important ways. On this event, see Jenson 2011, 81–121, Girard 2005a, 55–58 and 2005b, and Popkin 2008, 336–62. Robins and Jones 2009, 2–3 describe the 1804 massacre as a paradigmatic example of ‘subaltern genocide’. Dessalines spared the Polish mercenaries, who had been fighting in Saint-Domingue on the promise that they would win their own freedom from serfdom and whom Dessalines referred to as the ‘white Negroes of Europe’. For that phrase, see Buck-Morss 2009, 75. Daut’s analysis in this piece is particularly compelling, as she explores how the visual record of this era saw black violence through the lens of whiteness and accordingly depicted black bodies as the distillation of savagery. The original text of the edict is Recueil general des lois et des actes du gouvernement d’Haiti, 1:13. In his 1793 essay Considérations sur la nature de la Révolution de France, et sur les causes qui en prolongent la durée, Mallet wrote that à l’example de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants, ‘like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children’. Andújar and Nikoloutsos 2020, 10, discuss a parallel rhetorical example in which the relocation of the Portuguese royal court to Rio di Janeiro re-enacts the mythical themes of Saturn devouring his children. This speech has a complex history. It was composed by Dessalines and his secretary Juste Chanlatte and delivered in Haiti on April 28, 1804. It was first published in English in the New York based Commercial Advertiser on June 4 of that year and in French in Journal des débats et loix du pouvoir legislative et des actes du gouvernement, August 7,

1804–1822  33

19 20 21

22

23 24 25

1804. However much Chanlatte helped shape the script, the first-person voice is that of Dessalines, who claims to have defeated ‘the true cannibals’ (ces vrais cannibals) and concludes with the boast that is now used as a stand-in title for the speech: ‘I have avenged America’ (j’ai vengé l’Amerique). Ramsey 2011, 24 notes that the Code Noire, published in 1685, includes many regulations of religion but ‘no explicit interdiction of African-based ritual practices.’ For a discussion of the Greek-barbarian binary in Hippocrates’s text, see McCoskey 2012, 46–56. Like so many myths, the story of Saturn can be told differently. Especially in Roman sources, he is often depicted as the benevolent ruler of a Golden Age before agriculture, urbanization or politics. Dessalines’ words suggest no hint of this more positive version of Saturn, but the Saturn of the Golden Age will appear below. Sometime around 1820 the Spanish painter Francisco Goya completed his Saturno devorando a su hijo, ‘Saturn devouring his son’. This grim image, which Goya painted on the walls of his own home, is regularly understood as a reaction to the brutality of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). If Goya’s Saturn represents the Napoleonic regime, then his painting suggests associations similarly found in Dessalines’ words. These are Fanon’s phrases: 1968, 112 and 2007, 1. One legacy of this political designation of all Haitians as black is that the Creole word nèg, cognate with French nègre and English ‘negro’, became a generic word for a person or a ‘guy’ without strong racial implications. Girard 2005a, 63 claims that this moment of bringing Pétion’s vision into the north ‘changed Haiti more than all the revolutions and civil wars of the nineteenth century.’

1

‘We Are All Greeks’ President Boyer’s Letter to Greek Revolutionaries (1822)

– We are all Caribbeans

– James Clifford 1988

– Nous somme tous Américains – Le Monde, headline September 13, 2001, after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York – Nous sommes tous français – Barak Obama, November 24, 2015, after the November 13 attacks in Paris

In January 1822, as President Boyer was finalizing his plans to unify Hispaniola, he composed a short letter to four leaders of the Greek revolutionary movement who were then in France. In a few brief paragraphs, Boyer positions Haiti within the wider dynamics of revolution and coloniality across the world, and he does so by intertwining the liberatory histories of Haiti and Greece.1 As with Dessalines’ comments about the citizen-barbarian dyad and his manipulation of the image of Saturn devouring his children, Boyer constructs an anticolonial rhetoric that is rooted in ancient Greek ideals even as it is directed to Greek revolutionaries hoping to reclaim a share of those ideals for themselves. I begin this chapter by looking at the content of the letter itself before discussing its historical implications and, finally, setting it in dialogue with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous rallying cry, published in the same year and in the name of the same revolutionary movement that ‘we are all Greeks,’ a slogan echoed variously in the epigraphs to this chapter. By contrasting the models of Greek antiquity reflected by Boyer and Shelley, which reverberate through the later adaptions by James Clifford and Barack Obama, as well as the headline from Le Monde, I suggest that for all their shared support for the contemporary Greek cause, only Boyer offers an anticolonial sentiment that is freed from the limitations of race and religion.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-3

‘We Are All Greeks’  35 Boyer’s Letter to Greek Revolutionaries In August of 1821, only a few months into the struggle for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire, Adamantios Korais, Christodoulos Klonaris, Konstantinos Polychroniades and Athanassios Bogorides (also transliterated as Vogorides) wrote to Boyer asking that he support their cause. These four men were living in Paris at the time, where they could work outside the Ottoman ambit and where they must have heard plenty of news about Haiti and French colonies outside Europe. It is a sign of the racial politics of this era that Greeks stoking violent rebellion against the Ottomans were welcome in France and could communicate with the Haitian President, even as Louis XVIII was considering moves to re-establish SaintDomingue as a slave-owning colony of France and shortly before the indemnity, mentioned briefly in the introduction, was signed by Boyer and Louis’ successor, Charles X.2 From their position in France, these Greek revolutionaries ‘seem to have seen Haitian independence as an example and inspiration for their own struggle’ (Sideris and Konsta 2005, 167). Their original letter, which Richard Clogg cites as an example of Korais’ ‘political naiveté’ (2004, 187), is understood by Christina Oikonopomoulou as an indication that Korais recognized the symbolic power of engaging with Haiti as a country that was libre, independent et décolonisé du joug français (‘independent and free of the colonial yoke of France,’ 2021, 15).3 This diplomatic exchange is particularly important, because it represents the first recognition of an independent Greek state by any other country and one of the earliest acknowledgements of Haitian independence. France, for example, officially recognized the independence of Haiti in 1825 (through the extortionist indemnity signed by Boyer and Charles X) and that of Greece via the London Protocol in 1830 (co-signed by Great Britain and Russia). The U.S., meanwhile, recognized Greece in 1837 but, because of its political stances about race and slavery, waited until 1862 to recognize Haiti.4 Haiti and the modern nation of Greece, that is, have a surprisingly close and long history, forged through their shared experience of violently throwing off imperial domination. Korais and his partners asked for thirty thousand guns, money, and, ideally, a naval battalion, but the framing of his request is more important for my purposes than the specifics. Appealing to les angoisses de la servitude (‘the agonies of servitude’) that Haiti had previously experienced, perhaps avoiding the term esclavage (‘slavery’) out of decorum, Korais forges a fictive geographical proximity between Haiti and Greece: Enfans de cette Afrique, dont les parages sont contigus à ceux de la Grèce, venez à notre aide, ‘Children of this Africa, whose territories border upon those of Greece, come to our aid.’5 Korais here acknowledges Haiti’s African ancestry while tacitly passing over European, especially French, influences. He then situates Africa and Greece as neighbors, so that his call for help initially sounds like an appeal to a regional ally. We can make some sense of this geography by recognizing that Greek culture was not limited at this time to the borders of the modern Greek state as we now know it, and Alexandria, despite being part of Egypt, had a large Greek population. Understood from this perspective, Korais’

36  ‘We Are All Greeks’ words make some sense, but this is surely more of a rhetorical move than a serious geographical claim, since the vast majority of Africans brought to the Americas via the transatlantic slave trade came from West Africa. Furthermore, Korais immediately broadens the scope of his imagination by describing how, if Boyer could send a naval battalion, l’aspect de ces braves accourus du fond de l’Amérique, porteroit l’effroi dans l’âme de nos laches bourreaux, ‘the faces of these brave men rushing from the heart of America would strike terror in the souls of cowardly persecutors’. Any Haitian military support would demonstrate both the global reach of the Greek cause and that Greece had allies outside the confines of European hegemony. On January 15, 1822, Boyer replied to Korais and his companions in a letter that is preserved both in his original French and in the Greek translation of Ioannis Filemon (1789–1873) as part of his multivolume account of the Greek Revolution.6 In response to Korais’ request for money and weapons, Boyer addresses his words ‘to the Citizens of Greece’ (Aux citoyens de la Grèce, and in Filemon’s Greek: pros tous politas tês Helladas).7 Boyer’s salutation is simultaneously revolutionary and the first step in a time-bending message. It is revolutionary in that it immediately declares Haiti’s support for Greek independence, since Greek citizenship did not exist under the Ottoman system, and it is time-bending in that he reconfigures that Haitian Revolution in terms of classical Greek models of freedom and independence (a rhetorical move that can be found among many anti-colonial independence movements across the Americas).8 Perhaps Boyer was ready to support any independence movement against imperial powers, but this case holds special importance, since the entire European discourse about citizenship begins in ancient Greece. Roughly in the 8th century BCE, in response to a variety of factors, such as a rapid increase in population, the refinement of ironworking, and increased regional trade, the polis emerged as a new urban concept in ancient Greece.9 Of primary importance for understanding Boyer’s references to ancient Greece is the idea that the polis is not just a city. Cities, whether we think of ancient Rome, Biblical Sidon, or modern Port-au-Prince, can be ruled by a monarch or a clan or be part of an empire or a republic, but the Greek polis was not just the urban space and economic infrastructure. The polis was, fundamentally, the citizenry, a population bound together equally by their shared participation in the workings of the city and their shared differentiation from those excluded from such participation (primarily women, non-citizen residents, children and enslaved populations). Thus, as Boyer addresses these ‘citizens of Greece’ he is not just thinking away the superstructure of contemporary Ottoman power, but he is also re-activating the historical potency of ancient Greek participatory governance. Such a gesture would not have been lost on the likes of Korais, one of the key figures in the cultural rebirth of modern Greece and the author of Atakta (completed in 1835), the first modern Greek dictionary, which sought to purge foreign influences from the Greek language.10 From this opening address, Boyer begins to weave together the 19th century protagonists of his message: Haiti, Greece, France and the unnamed Ottomans. ‘Before I received your letter from Paris . . . the news about the revolution of your co-citizens [vos concitoyens; hoi sumpolitai] against the despotism which lasted for about three centuries had already arrived here.’11 Just as his Greek interlocutors had been hearing about Haitian independence in France, so too were Haitians following the situation

‘We Are All Greeks’  37 in Greece. Although France was then harboring this Greek foursome, Boyer creates a parallelism of oppression that aligns Haiti and Hellas as long-aggrieved parties suffering under the imperial oppression of the French and Ottoman Empires. The second sentence, however, shows a key difference between Haiti and Greece. Whereas the former is a wholly new nation, born of a mixture of African revolutionaries (Korais’ enfans de cette Afrique) throwing off the chains of European oppression on an island whose indigenous Taíno population had been all but exterminated by the Spanish, the latter had been an independent nation (or, more accurately, a network of independent poleis, pl. of polis) in the distant past. Boyer expresses his enthusiasm that Greece, even if under compulsion, is aiming to regain ‘her freedom and the position that she once held among the nations of the world.’12 The third sentence again draws the two nations together, this time even more tightly, as Boyer claims that ‘we [Haitians], like the Hellenes, were for a long time subjected to a dishonorable slavery and finally, with our own chains, broke the head of tyranny’.13 Taken together, these opening lines make up about a third of the entire letter and cast Haiti as a fitting partner for Greece. The former is the newer nation but currently enjoys the independence and autonomy of ancient Greek poleis, whereas the latter, with its ancient pedigree, suffers under an oppression the likes of which Haiti had overcome less than two decades ago. And whereas Korais had drawn a somewhat strained geographical connection between Haiti, as the child of Africa, and Greece, Boyer emphasizes the political ideals, so redolent in ancient Greek sources, that oppose slavery (esclavage) and tyranny (tyrannie), a word that emerges from the ancient Greek jargon of political oppression. Boyer sharpens such generalities into historical specifics in the remainder of the letter, while also explaining why (because of his economic responsibilities in what is now the Dominican Republic) Haiti could send nothing more than encouragement.14 But his encouragement is designed to amplify the connections between Haiti and Greece set out in his initial greeting: ‘Wishing to protect the descendants of Leonidas . . .’15 Leonidas I was the Spartan king and general who led the famous Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE that has become an iconic example of resisting totalitarian oppression.16 In that confrontation, a key moment in the GrecoPersian Wars (490–479 BCE), Leonidas stationed his troops in the narrow pass of Thermopylae (in northeastern Greece) and used that topography to his advantage against a vastly larger Persian army under the command of the Achaemenid Emperor Xerxes I.17 His three hundred Spartan warriors, the core of an army of about 7,000 allied Greeks, knew that they could not win, but they fought to the death and inflicted massive losses on the enemy. This battle was among the most celebrated military events of ancient Greek history, in large part because of the accounts that Leonidas and his followers faced certain death with equanimity. As Boyer evokes the legacy of Leonidas, therefore, he is rousing up the ancestral greatness of Greece while also inserting Haiti into that history. By hoping to ‘protect the descendants of Leonidas’, he is positioning Haiti as though it were an allied ancient Greek polis, and he is recasting the contemporary military confrontation with the Ottoman Empire as a replay of the Greco-Persian Wars. Whereas Leonidas’ story ended in glorious defeat, Boyer imagines a modern Greek victory over tyranny that can be powered, to some extent, by Haitian support.

38  ‘We Are All Greeks’ Boyer’s closing paragraph continues this same theme and warrants a full quotation: Citizens! [Citoyens] Convey to your compatriots the warm wishes that the people of Haiti send on behalf of your liberation. The descendants of ancient Hellenes look forward with impatience, in the reawakening of their history, to trophies worthy of Salamis. May they prove to be like their ancestors and, guided by the commands of Miltiades, be able, in the fields of the new Marathon, to achieve the triumph of the holy affair that they have undertaken on behalf of their rights, religion and motherland. May it be, at last, through their wise decisions, that they will be commemorated by history as the heirs of the endurance and virtues of their ancestors.18 In quick succession, Boyer continues his evocation of the Greco-Persian Wars. The Battle of Salamis, fought a few weeks after Thermopylae in 480, was a critical Greek naval victory over the Persian armada near the island of Salamis and close to Athens’ main naval port. Miltiades was the Athenian general who masterminded the earlier Athenian victory at Marathon (a coastal town within easy striking distance of Athens) in 490, which effectively ended the first phase of Persia’s invasion of Greece under King Darius (father of Xerxes). Miltiades positioned his smaller Greek army so that the larger Persian force, disembarking from ships, had to fight in marshy terrain where their cavalry was ineffective. These three points of reference (Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis) sketch the successful defense of Greece against the Persian invasion that was carried out by land and sea through the combined leadership and sacrifice of Athens and Sparta. By gathering these examples of the two great powers from classical Greece – Athens and Sparta – allying against Persia, Boyer could even be alluding to the two Revolutionary power bases that came together to defeat Napoleonic France – the black and mixedrace factions under Dessalines and Pétion.19 While Boyer may be hinting that Haiti and Greece should be understood as the modern heirs of these two Greek poleis, because both, like Athens and Sparta, fight against imperial oppression, he has developed a complex temporal scheme around this idea. His simple starting point is this: modern Greece can and should live up to the legacy of ancient Hellas. But around this, he asserts a role for Haiti. By throwing off French authority, Haiti has already lived up to the ancient Greek ideal (a point reiterated by Boyer’s dating of his letter to both 1822 and ‘the nineteenth year of Independence’ (l’an 19 de l’indépendance)) and positioned itself as an heir to that history not through shared racial or geographical ties but through a shared spirit of anti-colonial independence. Boyer invites his readers to conceive of the Haitian Revolution itself as a kind of Greco-Persian conflict, since both the Greek poleis and the Haitian revolutionaries faced long odds of success against larger, better supplied imperial powers. In this way, he portrays modern Greece as something of a younger sibling to Haiti, on the same path to freedom but not quite as far along. Thus, Korais and his team in France can look not only to the past, where they can be reminded of the geographical, linguistic and ethnic connections between themselves and the likes of Leonidas and Miltiades, but also to

‘We Are All Greeks’  39 the present, where Haiti offers them a contemporary model of successful liberation. Whereas the Greek revolutionaries can claim direct descent from heroic figures of ancient Greece, Haiti has already embodied the Greek political ideals of freedom and autonomy implying, though Boyer does not make this explicit, that Louverture, Dessalines, Pétion and Christophe (as well as Boyer himself) have lived up to the standards of the ancient Greek generals. These nineteenth-century Greek leaders probably hoped for more tangible support from Boyer, and all parties must have rued Haiti’s inability to send direct military support when, only a few months after Boyer penned his letter, the horrific Chios massacre took place in March 1822, in which tens of thousands of Greeks were killed or enslaved by Ottoman forces.20 Haiti’s early recognition of Greek independence constitutes an archival footnote in the history of Greece, but for the intersection of classicism and black history this letter is critical. Boyer denies that France, which was still at the height of its neoclassical era in 1822, had any exclusive or even primary claim to the legacy of ancient Greece. Indeed, his letter aligns contemporary France with ancient Persia, which was, from an ancient Greek perspective, the land of barbarians, the same term that the Haitian Declaration of Independence had used to describe the French occupiers of Saint-Domingue. Just as the ancient Greek poleis feared that Persia would enslave them, so too did Haiti fear the ongoing colonial objectives of contemporary France. By likening the Haitian Revolution to the Greek victory over Persia, Boyer activates the legacy of ancient Greece not through any coincidence of geography or race but, rather, through the idealism of independence from tyranny.21 Shelley’s Slogan Perhaps about the time that Korais and his compatriots were penning their appeal to Boyer, a very different form of support for the Greek cause was being articulated. Percy Bysche Shelley (1792–1822) was staying in Pisa when he completed his final work, the dramatic poem Hellas, which was published in 1822. Dedicated on November 1, 1821 to Prince Alexander Mavrokordato (Alexandros Mavrokordatos), who would play a leading role in both the Greek independence movement and the early years of the modern Greek nation, Hellas was directly inspired by Aeschylus’ Persians. That ancient play, staged in 472 BCE, is the only extant Greek tragedy that focuses on a historical (rather than a mythological) topic, namely the Greek naval victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480. Both Persians and Hellas focus on the valor and virtue of the Greek cause from the vantage of an eastern potentate, Xerxes I of Persia and the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud, respectively. Like Aeschylus’s Xerxes, Shelley’s Mahmud transitions from utter confidence to a forced and demoralizing recognition of defeat. A chorus of enslaved Greek women, whose fortunes rise as Mahmud’s fall, sing a hymn of praise to close the drama. This closing passage, for which Shelley drew inspiration from Virgil’s Eclogues 4, includes the couplet The world’s great age begins anew/The golden years return (583, lines 1060–61).22 As with the similar motto on U.S. seal, novus ordo seclorum (‘a new cycle of ages’), Shelley’s words recall Virgil’s: magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo,/iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna, ‘a great cycle of ages is born anew/as the Virgin comes back and the reign of Saturn returns’

40  ‘We Are All Greeks’ (4.5–6). Virgil’s poem, which eulogizes the greatly expected birth of a child who would lead Rome into peaceful stability, looks toward the establishment of a Golden Age of prosperity after the chaotic years of the Roman Civil Wars. In that context, the return of the Virgin, the female personification of Justice, symbolizes the end of a lawless interregnum that corresponds mythologically to Justice’s departure from the world in Hesiod’s archaic Greek poem Works and Days. And the re-establishment of the reign of Saturn looks not toward the Titan’s devouring of his children (discussed above) but, rather, his very different role as the overseer of a simple and rustic Golden Age. For Virgil’s Eclogues, published around 38 BCE, that Golden Age represents his highest hopes for a new Roman order, and Shelley’s virtual quotation of Virgil in his Aeschylean drama encapsulates his own hope for a Greece reborn into freedom and liberty. Shelley’s ambitions for the rebirth of Greece are noble, and so too is his play’s commentary on the futility of imperial militarism. His condemnation of Turkish power, together with his chastisement of England for being too slow to support the Greek cause, parallels Boyer’s support for Greek liberty against Ottoman imperialism in many ways. But his preface also reveals the limitations of Shelley’s vision. In discussing the inspiration he drew from Aeschylus’ Persians, he states that he hopes his ‘goat-song’ (the English word ‘tragedy’ derives from the Greek tragoidia, literally a ‘goat song’) will have a role to play in ‘the cause of civilization and social improvement’ (549). The etymology of the word civilization derives from the Latin words civis, civilis and civitas, ‘citizen’, ‘pertaining to citizens’, and ‘the citizen body’, respectively. Although to some extent Shelley may be activating such connotations in his use of ‘civilization’, since he hopes to see the Greek citizenry renewed, his greatest emphasis here surely lands on the idea of civilization as the opposite of barbarism. Shelley, thus, is manipulating some of the same concepts that I have discussed in the Haitian Declaration of Independence and in Boyer’s letter, but he does so in importantly different ways. We can see this clearly in broadening the perspective on Shelley’s most famous line from his Preface, ‘we are all Greeks’, and I quote the entire paragraph from which that statement comes (2003, 549): The apathy of the rulers of the civilised world to the astonishing circumstance of the descendants of that nation to which they owe their civilisation, rising as it were from the ashes of their ruin, is something perfectly inexplicable to a mere spectator of the shows of this mortal scene. We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece – Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters; or, what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China and Japan possess. This passage perfectly exemplifies what Kwame Anthony Appiah (2016) describes as the ‘golden nugget’, the story of the inheritance of ancient Greece that was passed to Rome and eventually comes to reside in northwestern European capitals and universities. For Shelley, the ‘rulers of the civilised world’ all reside in Europe

‘We Are All Greeks’  41 (as is made clear by his references in the Preface to England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Russia and the absence of any positive comment about places outside Europe), and they owe their civilized standing to Greece, as transmitted to them by Rome.23 Thus, when he claims that ‘we are all Greeks’, the point that needs to be clarified is this: how far does Shelley’s collective ‘we’ extend? Obviously, he does not include the Ottomans, and to that extent his vision aligns with Boyer’s in supporting liberty and opposing totalitarianism. In a different but related rhetorical context, Mimi Sheller has shown how such recourses to ‘the language of universality and “we-ness” .  .  . to describe the “new” global condition with which “we all” are now said to be living belies a specifically located (Western, metropolitan, privileged) position’ (2003, 274). Sheller clearly had the third epigraph to this chapter in mind, since she later discusses James Clifford’s comment, itself inspired by his reading of Aimé Césaire, that ‘we are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos . . . hybrid and heteroglot’ (Sheller 285; James 1988, 173). Sheller uses the ‘we-ness’ of Clifford’s statement to call out the blind-spots of his privileged position, and we can see in Shelley’s commentary on the importance of Greece for ‘the civilised world’ a similar revelation of his allegiances. If not for Greek ideas and ideals promulgated by Roman power ‘we’ might be ‘savages and idolaters’. With these two words, Shelley shows us that the opposite of civilization is savagery, roughly equivalent to the ancient Greek idea of the barbarian, and idolatry, which in this instance implies anything outside Christendom. China and Japan, rather than the Ottoman Empire, serve as the cultural and geographical antipodes of Shelley’s notion of civilization that is narrowly grounded in European territory and Christian ethics. In discussing this passage Dana Van Kooy describes Shelley’s rhetorical move in terms of ‘negating the cultural edifices of Eastern Culture’ (2009, 47). Phiroze Vasunia goes farther in showing how Shelley here ‘nimbly transmutes Hellenism into an enabling condition of imperialism and the civilizing mission’ and portrays Greco-Roman antiquity ‘as the necessary precursors to European modernity’ (2013, 311). It is no coincidence but, rather, a sign of the times that Boyer and Shelley were both looking to the Greek War of Independence in these months. Like the Haitian Revolution, the Greek victory over the Ottomans created ripple effects that extended across the globe.24 And like so many revolutionary movements of this era, the Greek cause pitted liberty against totalitarianism in ways that found many progressive supporters. But by reading the words of Boyer and Shelley against one another, we can also see contrasting visions of how far that progressive vision should extend. In a passage that was suppressed in the original publication of Hellas and not restored until the 1892 edition, Shelley briefly sounded a universalist message (Woodberry 1892, vol.3, 100–101): This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindlers, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members.

42  ‘We Are All Greeks’ But in the very next sentence, he undermines his global call and retreats to an exclusive focus on Europe as the primary civilizer: ‘But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions where are its chains . . .’ This commitment to civilization centered in European Christianity is on display again in his note to one of the final lines of Hellas. As the chorus sings Saturn and Love their long repose/shall burst, more bright and good/than all who fell, than One who rose,/than many unsubdu’d (lines 1090–91), Shelley explains that ‘many unsubdu’d’ refers to the gods who are ‘the monstrous objects of idolatry of China, India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America’ (2003, 586) and that the ‘horrors of the Mexican, the Peruvian, and the Indian superstitions are well known’ (ibid, 587). Boyer, in contrast to Shelley’s Eurocentrism, never limits his support for liberty in terms of geography or religion (let alone race) and builds his support for Greece around an opposition to political oppression and slavery. And so, in the final assessment, Boyer and Shelley agree that Ottoman oppression in Greece is the problem, but whereas the former sees the remedy in any independence movement that adheres to the ancient Greek ideals of autonomy and liberty, the latter finds the solution in an exclusively European delimitation of ‘we’ that promotes a denigration not just of Ottoman power, but, it would seem, of the ways in which the Ottoman Empire contrasted with European norms and values. Whereas Boyer stands against slavery and colonialism, Shelley stands against the ‘savagery and idolatry’ and ‘monstrous objects of idolatry’ he finds exemplified across many nonEuropean cultures. Boyer believes that the ‘golden nugget’ of Greek culture can be shared with Haiti just as easily as it was passed to Rome, because that nugget is fundamentally about ideas that are dissociated from matters of race and geography. For Shelley, that nugget remains the exclusive inheritance of Europe.25 Conclusion: The French Indemnity

In January 1822 Boyer was in no position to offer material aid to the Greek cause, because his resources were already stretched thin by his plan to take control of all of Hispaniola – a strategy that promised Haiti geographical security but which is often remembered from the Dominican perspective as pure colonial aggression. After the unification of the island in February, Boyer actively encouraged the migration of free black people from the U.S. to Haiti to build up the population and economy of the western part of the island. This brought him into dialogue with Robert Finey’s American Colonization Society (ACS), which promoted the idea that people of African descent could never fully assimilate into the U.S. and should, therefore, return to Africa or, in this case, the ‘Black Republic’ that was closer. In later years, the ACS would meet fierce opposition, most famously in the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization (1832), and its role in the establishment of Liberia was deeply problematic. But in 1824, the idea of helping free black people leave the U.S. and establish themselves in Haiti seemed viable. That year roughly six thousand immigrants arrived at the island nation, but their timing could hardly have been worse. They came to Haiti on the eve of the

‘We Are All Greeks’  43 most egregious example of neocolonial economic oppression ever seen, and consequently most of the people who had moved from the U.S. to Haiti soon returned. Had these immigrants found a more workable situation in Haiti, they might have chosen to stay and thereby increased the nation’s productivity and its economic prospects for the future. That future, however, dimmed in the face of pressure from Charles X, who had become King of France in September 1824. Through strong-armed negotiations and the threat of military invasion, Charles forced Boyer to agree to an indemnity of 150  million francs, payable over five years as compensation for the loss of France’s colonial holdings in Saint-Domingue. This settlement, ratified in July 1825, essentially bought off Haiti’s most pressing foreign threat by agreeing to pay reparations to the ousted slave masters, a complete economic and ethical inversion of modern discussions of reparations that should be paid to formerly oppressed people, not by them. Even setting aside the size of the financial transaction, this is a stark betrayal of Enlightenment ideals that reiterates the raw greed driving colonial politics. But when one investigates the details more closely, this indemnity looks even worse, as shown in the analysis of economist Thomas Piketty. The total debt obligation ‘represented 2 percent of French national income at the time or the equivalent of 40 billion euros in today’s money’ (2020, 217) or ‘more than 300 percent of Haiti’s national income in 1825 – in other words, three years of production’ (218). Unable to make even the first payments, Boyer had to defund domestic programs, such as the educational systems launched under Christophe and Pétion, raise taxes, and borrow 30 million more francs from France. This started a crippling cycle of protracted fiscal obligations, which, in real terms, meant that ‘Haiti was obliged to repay the equivalent of 15 percent of its national product every year, indefinitely, simply to pay the interest on the debt without even beginning to pay down the principal’ (ibid). This left Haiti in a situation in which ‘the island’s economic and political development was subordinated to the question of the indemnity’ (ibid). Unable to escape the looming weight of these payments, Haiti continued to suffer under its legacy. Piketty picks up the story a full century later, as the neocolonial baton is passed from France to the U.S.: ‘With the support of the French government, the banks ultimately decided to cede the rest of their loans to the United States, which occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 to restore order and protect American financial interests’ (ibid, my emphasis). Haiti finally paid off this debt, initially slated to last only five years, in 1947.26 To adapt a line from Abderrahmane Sissako’s film ‘Bamako’ (2006), which dramatizes the neocolonial economic plight of Africa, Haiti ‘is a victim of her wealth, not her poverty.’ France enriched itself on the fecundity of colonial SaintDomingue and in response to the loss of its colony demanded still more. The U.S., when it grew into a regional power, partnered with France in overseeing this extraction of wealth away from Haiti. The mind boggles at trying to comprehend how thoroughly the young nation’s fortunes were impeded by the burden of this indemnity, and as on so many topics related to Haiti, Marlene Daut has articulated the crux of this matter compellingly. The contemporary wealth inequalities between

44  ‘We Are All Greeks’ Haiti and France ‘are the concrete consequences of stolen labour from generations of Africans and their descendants. And because the indemnity Haiti paid to France is the first and only time a formerly enslaved people were forced to compensate those who had once enslaved them, Haiti should be at the center of the global movement for reparations’ (Daut 2020b). Notes 1 This statement should not be understood as absolving Boyer of his complicity in the Haitian colonization of Santo Domingo. 2 In 1814, Drouin de Bercy published a tract that imagines the benefits of using genocidal tactics to recolonize Haiti for France: De Saint-Domingue: de ses guerres, de ses revolutions, de ses ressources et des moyens à prendre pour y rétablir la paix et l’industrie. Daut 2015, 103–104 discusses de Bercy’s writings as part of wider trends involving French strategies of violence toward Haiti. 3 Oikonomopoulou’s important work is cited here by gracious permission of the author. 4 France, Great Britain and Russia had all provided critical military support to the Greek cause at the Battle of Navarino in 1827, which represents a tacit acknowledgement of the Greek state, even though official ratification was delayed until 1830. 5 Text follows Korais 1982, vol. 4, 305, document number 905 with my translation. 6 Filemon 1859–1861, vol. 4, 368–69. The letter’s Document Number at the Greek National Library is 02787611. Sideris and Konsta 2005 provide an English translation of Filemon’s version of Boyer’s letter and a brief analysis of its importance but not the Greek text. I am grateful to my colleague Gregory Jusdanis and to Dr. Maria Georgopoulou, Director of the Gennadios Library at the American School in Athens, for helping me access Filemon’s Greek transcription. 7 Translation following Sideris and Konsta 2005. 8 The forging of rhetorical connections between local independence movements and ancient Greece was common throughout the colonized Americas. For broader discussions of this phenomenon, see Taboada 2014, Conn 2018 and Miller 2018. 9 For more on the Greek polis, see Hansen 2006, Hall 2007, and Arnason et al., 2013. 10 For Korais’ role in shaping the modern Greek nation, see the essays in Kitromilides 2010. 11 Avant que je ne reçoive votre lettre de Paris, datée du 20 août dernier, les nouvelles de la revolution de vos concitoyens contre le despotism qui a duré environ trois siècles était déjà arrives ici. Boyer’s use of concitoyens parallels that of Louis-Alexandre, duc du La Rochefoucauld in his translation of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the various constitutions of the newly established American states that was completed at the request of Benjamin Franklin (Constitutions des treize États-Unis de l’Amérique, 1783). For example, in rendering the line from the Declaration of Independence ‘He [i.e. King George of England] has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, and destroyed the lives of our People’, Rochefoucauld translated ‘people’ as concitoyens. For a useful discussion of the political valence of the French word peuple, ‘people’, in this era, see Marienstras and Wulf 1999, 1310–1311. 12 sa liberté et la position qu’elle occupait autrefois parmi les nations du monde; τὴν ἐλευθερίαν αὑτῆς καὶ τὴν θέσιν, ἣν μεταξὺ τῶν ἐθνῶν τοῦ κόσμου κατεῖχε (368). 13 nous [les Haïtiens], comme les Hellènes, avons longtemps été soumis à un esclavage déshonorant et avons finalement, avec nos propre chaînes, brisé la tête de la tyrannie; ὡς οἱ Ἕλληνες, ἐπὶ πολὺν καιρὸν ἔκλινον τὸν αὐχένα ὑπὸ ζυγὸν ἐπονείδιστον, καὶ διὰ τῶν ἀλύσεων αὑτῶν συνέτριψαν τὴν κεφαλὴν τῆς τυραννίας (368). 14 Oikonomopoulou 2021, 14 repeats a claim, found in various online sources without citation, that Boyer did send a huge amount of coffee (Oikonomopoulou asserts 45 tons, but I have seen other numbers as well) and a hundred men, with the intention that the coffee

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be sold in support of the Greek cause. This shipment, so the story goes, sank or, in one variation, was captured by pirates. Désireux de protéger les descendants de Léonidas . . .; Εὐχηθέντες πρὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν, ὃπως ὑπερασπισθῇ τοὺς ἀπογόνους τοῦ Λεωνίδου . . . (369). For the prominent role of Sparta in French neoclassical and Enlightenment culture (largely filtered through the testimony of Plutarch), see Mason 2009 and Krull 2017. In Boyer’s era, Jacques-Louis David completed his neoclassical painting Leonidas at Thermopylae in 1814. With the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence comparisons to Thermopylae were common. One relevant example of this comes from John Russwurm, co-founder of the black newspaper Freedom’s Journal, who invoked Leonidas in expressing his support for the Greek cause: ‘Oh, that another Leonidas might rise in this here time of need, and drive the flag of the Crescent from the second land of freedom, arts, and refinement. Awake, ye Greeks, think on the spirit of your ‘ancient sires’ like them, let your breasts be opposed as ramparts in defence of your country’s soil; like them, die all freemen, and live not to witness the despotism of your oppressors!’ (April 20, 1827). Levene 2007 discusses various engagements with the Battle of Thermopylae in film and popular culture (mostly in the U.S.) In more recent times, the Battle of Thermopylae and the phrase molôn labe (‘come and take them’), which Leonidas supposedly said in response to a Persian request that the Greek soldiers surrender their weapons, have frequently appeared in connection with white nationalist and farright political organizations in the U.S. The Pharos project, run by Curtis Dozier at Vassar College, has charted numerous uses of the phrase molôn labe by far-right groups and individuals in the U.S. The most recent discussion of this theme was a blog post dated April 15, 2022 and titled ‘How Classics Made its Way into the “Freedom Convoy” ’ (coauthored by Pharos and Katherin Blouin). The Greek historian Herodotus claims that the Persian army numbered about a million (7.61–88). Cartledge 2006, 110 claims that no modern re-assessment of this exaggerated figure would go below 80,000, though he suspects that this figure is too low. Although precision is impossible, it seems that the Greeks faced numerical odds of at least ten to one (and perhaps significantly higher). Citoyens! [Filemon renders citoyens with the Greek Πολῖται] Transmettez à vos compatriotes les voeux chaleureux que le peuple d’Haïti envoie au nom de votre libération. Les descendants des anciens Hellènes attendent avec impatience, dans le réveil de leur histoire, des trophées dignes de Salamis. Puissent-ils se montrer comme leurs ancêtres et être guidés par les commandements des Miltiades, et pouvoir, dans les champs du nouveau Marathon, réaliser le triomphe de la sainte affaire qu’ils ont entreprise au nom de leurs droits, de leur religion et de leur patrie. Que ce soit enfin, par leurs sages décisions, qu’ils soient commémorés par l’histoire comme les héritiers de l’endurance et des vertus de leurs ancêtres. Such an idea garners some support from the fact that it was also in 1822 that Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, born in Guadaloupe and working in France, unveiled his neoclassical ‘Oath of the Ancestors’ that depicts the moment when Dessalines and Pétion joined forces. For this painting, see Grigsby 2001. Beaton 2013 has shown how international support for the Greek cause was often tenuous and delayed. This may suggest that the appeal to Haiti was largely symbolic or that Korais was desperate to find alternate sources of support. Oikonomopoulou 2021, 15 discusses both options. Joseph T. Wilson (1836–91) would make a similar move later in the century. Wilson, a black veteran of the U.S. Civil War, published two texts that connected black soldiery with ancient Greek models: Emancipation: Its Course and Progress from 1481 BC to 1875 AD (1882) and The Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States in the Wars of 1775–1812, 1861-’65 (1887). Throughout both texts, Wilson uses the image of the phalanx, the citizen-soldier formation par excellence of classical Greece, to connect black soldiers in the U.S. to the model of classical antiquity, as when

46  ‘We Are All Greeks’

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26

he describes black soldiers ‘dying with Spartan courage in the modern Thermopylae’ (1882, 141). For more on Wilson’s texts, see Strauss 2005, especially 42–43. Citations follow Leader and O’Neill 2003. A point noted by Stock 2010, 122. The most recent discussions of the impact of the Greek War of Independence include Mazower 2021, Ilicak 2021 (which assembles the Ottoman state records relating to the war), and the relevant chapters in Beaton 2021. Within the U.S., a similar debate played out around sympathies for the Greek cause. Hiram Power’s wildly popular sculpture, ‘The Greek Slave’ (1844), inflamed American audiences through its evocation of Turkish sexual predation upon a beautiful, modest and marble-white Greek woman. Abolitionists saw the arousal of such sympathies as clear racial hypocrisy, since slavery continued unabated across the American South. John Tenniel’s drawing ‘The Virginian Slave, Intended as a Companion to Power’s Greek Slave’ (1851) highlighted this tension. For more on this issue, see Malamud 2019, 80–88. A similarly impactful economic issue focuses on a tiny island located between Jamaica and Haiti, though closer to the latter. Navassa Island, an uninhabited island with massive deposits of phosphorus-rich guano, has been controlled by the U.S. since 1957 as an unincorporated territory through the 1956 Guano Islands Act. Haiti’s claims to the island can be traced back through its founding documents and even to the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, which transferred the western portion of Hispaniola from Spain to France. The island’s guano served as the catalyst for modern agricultural fertilizers, and that massive wealth has all accrued to the U.S. Alcenat 2021 and Skaggs 1994 study this issue from contrasting perspectives. The former situates Navassa in terms of the wider neocolonial economic oppression of Haiti, whereas the latter deals with Navassa as part of the wider American rush to capitalize Caribbean guano resources.

2

The ‘Lake of Lies’ Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859)

ἓν γὰρ δὴ τοῦτο ἀληθεύσω λέγων ὅτι ψεύδομαι. The one true thing I’ll say is that I’m lying.

– Lucian of Samosata

By 1843, President Boyer’s fortunes had fallen to the point that he was forcibly ousted from the presidency. He fled the country and died in France in 1850. With his departure, Haitian control of the eastern part of Hispaniola quickly collapsed.1 The Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from Spain but from Haiti, and much of the political history of the following decade can be charted in terms of the ebb and flow of Haitian efforts to reunify the island. Faustin Soulouque was the longest ruling Haitian leader of this era, serving first as president (1847–49) and then as Emperor Faustin I (1849–1859), and he led unsuccessful invasions of the Dominican Republic in 1849, 1853, and 1855–56. Domestically, Soulouque promoted black leadership and Vodou in stark contrast to Boyer’s administration, which was dominated by mixed-race elites and Francophile habits.2 It was under Soulouque’s regime that Émeric Bergeaud (1818–1858) left Haiti after participating in a failed coup, relocated to Saint Thomas, and composed the first novel written by a Haitian author, although he did not live to see its publication in Paris in 1859.3 Bergeaud’s Stella retells the story of the Haitian Revolution using the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus as its over-arching metaphor, and it leans heavily into the fraught relationship between the black and mixed-race factions throughout the revolutionary era that continued to impact Haitian life in the 1850’s. Marlene Daut has recently offered a deep analysis of Stella, and my approach is indebted to her insights.4 Whereas the main focus of her analysis is the way that Bergeaud’s presentation of the Revolution fits within wider discussions of Haiti’s racialized history, I emphasize how Stella harnesses Greco-Roman mythology and history in the service of Haitian nation-building. Bergeaud was born more than a decade after the end of the Revolution, but his family’s role in early Haiti put him in a prime position to observe how the new nation was positioning itself in the post-Revolutionary era. He was born in the southwestern city of Les Cayes to a wealthy and influential family of gens de couleur. Les Cayes’s most famous son, André Rigaud, had led the mixed-race faction in DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-4

48  The ‘Lake of Lies’ Haiti throughout much of the Revolution, and Bergeaud’s family had close ties with Rigaud. The latter twice left Saint-Domingue in defeat, once after the War of the South (1799–1800), in which his forces (including his lieutenants Alexandre Pétion and Boyer) lost to Toussaint Louverture (and his assistants Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe), and again in 1803 after he took part in Leclerc’s disastrous invasion. He returned to Haiti for the final time in 1810 and established himself as president of the State of the South, a short-lived polity centered in Les Cayes and outside the power of both Pétion’s Republic of Haiti and Christophe’s State of Haiti. When Rigaud died in 1811, he handed the presidency to Bergeaud’s uncle, Jérôme-Maximilien Borgella (1773–1844), who within a year agreed to join Pétion’s Republic. Bergeaud learned about Haitian politics and history by serving as Borgella’s secretary for many years. As a gens de couleur from a southern family, it is not surprising that Bergeaud supported President Boyer, and as President Soulouque was consolidating power in the run-up to declaring himself emperor, Bergeaud left Haiti for Saint Thomas in 1848, the same year that France outlawed slavery throughout its empire.5 In 1857 he made a brief trip to Paris, where he gave the manuscript of Stella to his friend, the Haitian historian and politician Beaubrun Ardouin (1796–1865), who edited and published the novel soon after Bergeaud’s death in Saint Thomas. Whatever Bergeaud had hoped or expected, the publication of his novel in France and while in exile from Haiti, means that his primary audience must have been worldly French readers and Francophone elites from Haiti, the Caribbean, the U.S. and Europe. Before addressing the content of Stella, which presents a version of the Haitian Revolution built upon the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus, it will be useful to focus on the way in which he situates his chosen genre, and how thoroughly he infuses it with references to ancient Greece, Rome and the Bible. Stella: Genre and Style In his ‘Author’s Note’ prepended to Stella Bergeaud begins crafting his opposition between History and the Novel, as literary forms. This brief statement suggests that History is more laborious and detailed and that Bergeaud has opted for the Novel in order to reach audiences who want something more leisurely than History might afford. This point becomes much more complicated within Stella, just before Bergeaud introduces his Caribbean versions of Romulus and Remus (17):6 History is a river of truth that follows its majestic course through the ages. The Novel is a lake of lies, the expanse of which is concealed underwater; calm and pure on the surface, it sometimes hides the secret of the destiny of peoples and societies in its depths, much like Lake Asphaltites [i.e., the Dead Sea]. History, a sonorous echo, faithfully reproduces the sound and fury of human hurricanes. To brave these storms and guide our savage heroes to port requires something other than a frail canoe of bark; and besides, savages ourselves, we have neither map, nor compass, nor nautical expertise. Thus

The ‘Lake of Lies’  49 the experienced pilot to the stormy sea and we to the tranquil lake; trusting to the breath of God, perhaps we will arrive at the end of our journey, guided by the Star of Nations!7 Bergeaud likens the two genres to contrasting bodies of water. History has a current leading to the open sea, aims to ‘faithfully reproduce’ human turmoil, and requires the nautical skills and equipment of an expert pilot. The Novel, by contrast, is duplicitous, non-directional, and hides its deepest meanings under surface calm. Against this strange opposition, Bergeaud positions himself as so inexpert, unprepared and ‘savage’ that the Novel is his only option. Setting out on this ‘tranquil lake’ and doubting whether he will reach his journey’s end, he leaves his readers unsure if they should expect lies, surface simplicity, deep meaning or some mixture of all three. In his fourth-century BCE Poetics, Aristotle developed a similar opposition between poetry and history. He claims that poetry (poiêsis) is ‘more philosophical’ than history (historia), because ‘the former relates things that have happened, and the latter what might happen’ and ‘because poetry relates universals, and history relates events in sequence’ (9.1451b).8 The novel did not exist in Aristotle’s day, but we can reasonably assume that his notion of poetry, which included extended mythical narratives such as the Homeric epics, would encompass Bergeaud’s Novel.9 As Bergeaud foregrounds the difficulty and laboriousness of historical writing, therefore, his false modesty seems positively Aristotelian in its implicit claim to accessing deeper truths. Bergeaud’s generic comments also echo the preface to Lucian of Samosata’s second-century C.E. Greek novel True Histories (Verae Historiae). Although Lucian is today less widely known than Aristotle, both Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus produced popular translations of his humorous and satirical works in the 16th century, and a complete French translation by Abbé Massieu appeared in 1781. Lucian remained fashionable thereafter and influenced such literary giants as Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, Voltaire and Diderot. Bergeaud thus may have read Lucian in Greek or French, but with so many influential intermediaries, a direct link need not exist to create a ‘fuzzy connection’ that spurs productive interactions between the two texts.10 The preface to True Histories attacks historical and geographical writers, including broad swipes at Herodotus, as a bunch of charlatans who collect tall tales and try to pass them off as factual. Lucian claims that he has nothing particularly worth relating to the world, but his vanity (kenodoxia) urges him to write something that will be of use to scholars when they take a break from their more serious work. He prepares his readers for (and soon delivers) wild and far-fetched adventures, with clever and biting allusions to both historical and poetic texts scattered throughout, and he makes just one promise, which forms the epigraph to this chapter: ‘The one true thing I’ll say is that I’m lying’ (4).11 Karen ní Mheallaigh’s brilliant study of Lucian’s fictionality captures the sense of his ancient novel and offers interpretations exportable to my interest in reading Lucian and Bergeaud in tandem. ‘By presenting [True Histories] as an ainigma, a

50  The ‘Lake of Lies’ riddle or series of veiled references which hint at something else, Lucian invites the reader to interpret every detail in it as a sign which points towards other texts’ (2014, 207, with original emphasis). Lucian’s novel enfolds a complex tissue of textual references, and Bergeaud’s Stella invites a similar style of engagement, especially through the dissonance of telling the origins of Haiti in terms of the mythical origins of Rome to a Francophone audience (in an era when French was the lingua franca across the ambit of European imperialism). Ní Mheallaigh reveals Lucian’s dense literary referencing to earlier authors (many, such as Homer and Plato, who were already canonical in Lucian’s day) to be a symptom of his cultural belatedness, a strange temporal realm in which past originality and presenttime recycling of old material blur together. Drawing upon Umberto Eco’s writings about hyperreality, she notes that ‘The cult of the absolute fake asserts itself as an improvement on reality and provides for the tourist or viewer an experience that aspires to be more authentic and more ‘real’ than the real thing: hyperreal’ (233). The dynamism of these riddlingly attractive fakes takes Lucian’s tourist on a ‘journey through the world of fiction [as] a means to problematize and play with the reader’s notions of what is true and what is authentic, and to explore what those values mean in the context of a culture that self-consciously and synthetically recreates its own origins from the classical past in the imperial present’ (234). Ní Mheallaigh is speaking of the ‘classical past’ from Lucian’s perspective within the Roman Empire of the 2nd century C.E., but we can adjust the timeframe to fit the case of Bergeaud, who is crafting an origin story for Haiti partially built around a narrative gleaned from the classical Roman past within the era of French imperialism. Lucian and Bergeaud foreground the inadequacies of themselves and their narratives (both being fakes, in Eco’s sense), but by unburdening their readers of the mendacity (Lucian) or factual tedium (Bergeaud) of historical accuracy (‘the real thing’, ‘the original’), both authors chart an alternative path toward deeper understanding through the avowed artificiality of hyper-realism. When seen from this perspective, it is precisely through Bergeaud’s Lucian-esque enigmas (‘the secret of the destiny of peoples and societies’) that his Novel can access the deep and hidden truths of the ‘lake of lies’. Although Lucian clearly aims to strike a funnier and more satirical tone than does Bergeaud, whose nationalistic mission is certainly earnest, both authors align themselves with lies, set their own undertakings above that of historiography, facetiously deprecate their own skills, and urge their readers to look for hidden or coded truths within their tales. For Bergeaud, one such set of hidden treasures, that are not strictly necessary within historical writing, is his network of allusions to ancient Greek, Roman and Biblical material – many, though not all, deriving from the classical curriculum studied by many elite Haitian men. Stella is strewn with such references, many of which do little to impact the plot or character development, but they assert a claim upon the classical tradition that situates Bergeaud and Haiti as natural and obvious heirs to Greco-Roman antiquity. With France having just outlawed the enslavement of black bodies in 1848 and with the U.S. still decades away from doing so, such a claim from a non-white author represents, in itself, an important example of the hacking of classical forms. Speaking to the parallel situation in post-colonial

The ‘Lake of Lies’  51 Nigeria, Barbara Goff and Michaels Simpson contrast the conceptually simpler ousting of the colonizer with the thornier recognition that ‘the colonizer’s cultural power, as vested in ‘his’ art and his educational system, persists and can be addressed only by the formerly colonized subject critically embracing it and seeking redemptive possibility within the fraught hybridity of its relationship with indigenous culture’ (2007, 79, emphasis added). Bergeaud’s hacking, especially in reference to the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus, goes beyond a critical embrace, since he radically transforms and repurposes the colonial arts for postcolonial purposes. The end result is, indeed, a hybrid novel, but Bergeaud leans into the friction between the constituent elements of that hybrid in a manner that ensures that his critical embrace of Roman mythology is carried out on Haitian terms. Bergeaud quotes four brief bits of Latin taken from Virgil (10, Georgics 1.95–96), Horace (28, Epistles 1.2.26), Ovid (38, Epistulae ex Ponto 3.1.158) and Cicero (132, Philippics 14.12/31). All these cases follow roughly the same pattern of having a light engagement with the narrative momentum of the novel, but they contribute greatly to its rhetorical effect. For example, when Bergeaud’s Romulus and Remus experience simultaneous visions of their dead mother, Bergeaud writes: ‘The tears of the two brothers flowed abundantly . . . lacrymae pondera vocis habent’ (37–38, with original ellipsis).12 The Latin phrase here comes from a moment when Ovid, in exile from Rome, is advising his wife about how to advocate on his behalf, and he tells her that ‘tears have the weight of words’. Rather than opening new interpretive vistas within Stella, this bit of Latin (like the quotations of Virgil Horace and Cicero) primarily serves as a demonstration to the colonial European powers that the legacies of Greece and Rome were as available, familiar and useful to Haitian artists as they were to Europeans. In addition to direct quotations, Bergeaud references (listed here by thematic grouping) Biblical material – the Dead Sea (17), David and Goliath (44), the serpent in the Garden of Eden (46) and Deborah (72); specific classical texts – the beauty of Lucretian verse (42) and the plot of Xenophon’s Anabasis (50); mythological divinities and monsters – Circe (8), the Titans (9), the Riddle of the Sphinx (19), Athena (41), the Hydra (46) and the Minotaur (66), Nemesis (96), Apollo (172); historical people, places and events – the Spartan defense of Thermopylae (19), the Parthenon (30–31), Spartacus (31), Lycurgus the Spartan (70), Alexander the Great (63), Julius Caesar (63), Hannibal and Rome’s conflict with Carthage (63); and customs or ideas – the classical ideals of marble statuary (11), the lex talionis (‘law of retaliation’, 20), and Roman spectacle entertainment (146). In a more obscure example, for which Bergeaud reaches beyond the most familiar Greco-Roman references, he compares the Russian tactics of burning fields while retreating before Napoleon to the case of Herostratus, who, according to Theopompus and Strabo, burned the Ephesian Temple of Artemis in 356 BCE (91). Sometimes Bergeaud seems to allude to still other narratives but without explicit citations. His heavy rhythm of overt allusions to such material creates a ‘lake of lies’ effect in which the reader cannot be sure if these more tenuous evocations or ‘fuzzy connections’ were intended or emerge through the process of reading. For example, in advance of one military conflict, which ends up going badly, Stella

52  The ‘Lake of Lies’ warns Romulus and Remus: ‘Go, then; be careful and do not venture too far. If you happen to meet the enemy in large numbers, avoid fighting him . . .’ (45).13 Is this an allusion to Homer’s account of Achilles’ warning to Patroclus to engage the Trojans but not to advance too far from the Achaean camp (Iliad 16.87–96)? I believe that it is, but because of the ‘lake of lies’ effect, I am not certain if I or Bergeaud have created this connection. This is surely part of the intended impact of Bergeaud’s style, and readers may or may not agree that Stella also includes such thinner evocations of the plight of Hecuba (13), the beauty of Helen (28), the Choice of Heracles (46), Livy’s story about Romulus and Remus trying to settle their dispute by looking to the sky for omens (89), France as a child-killing Medea (101), Aeneas’ reaction to seeing the sword-belt of Pallas at the end of Virgil’s Aeneid (122), the Periclean strategy of gathering the Athenian population inside the city walls rather than risking open battle with the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War (125), the death of Actaeon (149), Zeus’ use of thunderbolts as a form of divine judgment (8 and 119), and perhaps others that I have not noticed.14 This combination of quotations, direct references and ‘fuzzy connections’, many of which would have been familiar to anyone trained in the classical curriculum, creates in Stella an ongoing dialogue between the ancient Mediterranean and his contemporary Haitian context that would have fostered a sense of intellectual solidarity among his audience.15 This prompts the reader who is attuned to these matters toward a more active form of engagement, one that facilitates a movement from the surface tranquility of the novelistic ‘lake’ toward the deeper meaning about the nation’s history and identity below the surface. Romulus, Remus and the Haitian Revolution Bergeaud situates the fulcrum of that deeper meaning in the main topic of his novel, namely the importance of the Haitian Revolution. Stella roughly follows the complex historical narratives set out in annalistic sources, but its approach is wholly different. In the prefatory ‘Author’s Note’ (Avertissement), Bergeaud states that his goal is to present an enjoyable tale through the expressive mode of the novel that offers a true and accurate account but without ‘the strict seriousness of history’.16 To accomplish this, his narrative strategy folds the swirling cast of historical figures – French, African, British, Spanish, enslaved, free, owners, generals – into a pared-down cast of five symbolic characters: Marie the African (or, at times, ‘the African,’ the maternal symbol of Haiti’s connection to Africa), Stella (the blondehaired, virginal embodiment of French Enlightenment ideals), the Colonist (a cipher for the French plantation-owning class who controlled Saint-Domingue), and Romulus and Remus (Haitianized versions of the Roman twins and sons of Marie). Around the story of these five main players Bergeaud frequently adds historical specifics, and his manuscript included a set of notes that further expands pertinent details. But the gist of his entire narrative can be summarized exclusively in terms of his five principals. Marie was born in Africa to a tribal leader and the daughter of a king. Her parents arranged an ideal marriage for Marie, and she was already pregnant when a

The ‘Lake of Lies’  53 neighboring group attacked, killing her father and husband. She and her mother were sold into slavery. On route to Saint-Domingue her mother died, and Marie gave birth to a son, Romulus. In the colony, she is purchased by the Colonist, a petty noble from France who has come to Saint-Domingue to make it rich and who represents a distillation of all the worst excesses of les grand blancs.17 The Colonist rapes Marie, and she soon gives birth to a second son, Remus. Before the two boys have grown to adulthood, they must endure the sight of the Colonist whipping Marie to death. Romulus and Remus bide their time to avenge the murder of their mother, and they leave the Colonist’s plantation in order to establish a base of operations in the mountains. Romulus, the older son whose father was African, represents the massive black population that rose up from slavery during the Revolution. At times he stands for that entire group, while at other points he clearly represents Toussaint Louverture or Jean-Jacques Dessalines, specifically. The younger Remus, whose father is the Colonist, represents the mixed-race population, particularly as it was headed, at different times, by Vincent Ogé, André Rigaud, and Alexandre Pétion. Romulus and Remus soon attack the Colonist’s mansion and discover a beautiful, light-skinned, blonde-haired young woman, whom they initially take prisoner. They assume that she is the Colonist’s daughter, and, with Horace’s ira furor brevis est (‘anger is a temporary madness’) offered as explanation, they plan to sacrifice her to their mother’s spirit.18 As they approach with weapons drawn, they are overcome by her beauty and pledge their devotion to her before they discover her true identity. This woman is the novel’s title character and its most grandiose abstraction. Stella stands for all things good and pure, and she is the idealization of European Christian and Enlightenment values, even declaring herself to be Liberty itself (175). Born in France and raised on meager means, she escapes the horrors of the Reign of Terror and comes to Saint-Domingue where she is imprisoned by the lustful Colonist, whose repeated marriage proposals she refuses. She becomes the mentor and inspiring figurehead for Romulus and Remus, who prepare for a protracted confrontation with the Colonist. For his part, the Colonist realizes that he is up against a staunch foe and decides to foster dissent between the brothers, eventually luring Romulus to his side and pitting his forces against those of Remus. Romulus presses his advantage cruelly against his brother, and Remus effectively surrenders. With one brother out of action, the Colonist next betrays and undermines Romulus, leaving him too, sorely weakened. At this point, the brothers reunite, and their combined forces eventually defeat the Colonist. The brothers vanquish their foe for good and bring the new nation of Haiti into existence. This summary leaves aside myriad details but effectively traces the plotlines of Bergeaud’s symbolic characters. With them he has created a basic typology of gendered and racialized colonial demographics, including an origin story for the (overly simplified) black and gens de couleur populations that stand in opposition to European colonialism (though at times with different priorities). In terms of a nationalist agenda, Bergeaud is as progressive in his vision of a ‘new myth about “race” ’ (Daut 2015, 440) that embraces Haiti as a ‘mixed’ society, as he is regressive on matters of gender (a topic I will return to later in this chapter), with his two symbolic female

54  The ‘Lake of Lies’ characters showing no direct or actively engaged role for women in the emergence of Haiti.19 In terms of Romulus and Remus, it is critical that the groups these two represent are presented as brothers, taking the revolutionary language of brother- and sisterhood and tracing it back to Africa through the tragic figure of Marie.20 By giving these brothers names taken from the mythology of Rome’s founding, Bergeaud supplies his readers (the Haitian educated elite but also those of a similar class from across Europe and France’s colonial reach) with a ready-made interpretive foil for his account of Haitian history. Compared to many of the thinner reference noted above, the story of Romulus and Remus is critical to any reading of the novel. Through Bergeaud’s creative deformation of a well-known Roman myth, Stella represents one of the most sustained and complex examples of hacking classical forms in Haitian literature. Bergeaud may have hoped that his novel and his classical erudition would help Haiti join what he terms the ‘aristocracy of nations’ (183, l’aristocratie des nations, 324), but he certainly sought to bring all Haitians together, recognizing a national solidarity that could override racial divisions fostered by the colonial system of control. And although his familiarity with classical material came through the pipeline of the European educational system, his references to ancient Greece and Rome nevertheless damningly critique European hegemony. Indeed, one of the clear messages of Stella, reiterating Boyer’s message in his letter to Korais (Chapter 1), is that Europe ultimately failed to put the ideals of the Enlightenment into universal practice and that it was Haiti that first achieved a strong and comprehensive acknowledgement of the fundamental humanity and personhood of all people.21 And while much of Bergeaud’s rhetoric emerges from a European brand of Christianity, I  will suggest some ways in which he may effect a harmonization of ancient Greek and Roman mythology with Haiti’s African-Caribbean identity, most obviously by casting the Roman twins as the nonwhite, dark-skinned founders of Haiti. Romulus and Remus enter Stella from the world of Roman mythology, where their legend was told in a variety of ways, though it is most familiar from the version preserved by Livy (The History of Rome, 1.4) as well as the many visual images of them, most often depicted as young children suckling a wolf (a type scene already depicted on early Roman coins). Romulus and Remus were the twins who founded the city of Rome. Their mother, Rhea Silvia, was a niece of King Amulius of Alba Longa, a city built, according to another tale, by the son of Aeneas, alternately named Ascanius or Iulus. The twins’ father was Mars, the Roman god of war. Seeing these boys as a threat to the royal succession, King Amulius had the babies abandoned by the Tiber River, but the god of that water, Tiburinus, saved the children. They were famously suckled by a she-wolf and later raised by local shepherds. Grown to adulthood, they deposed Amulius and created a new city but argued over who should rule it. Predictable violence ensued, and, in an act that would haunt Rome forever, Romulus killed Remus for crossing the sacred boundary or pomerium of their new city. Romulus gave his name to the city and became its first king, but the shadow of Remus lingered in meditations on Roman civil strife.22 The standard Roman myth describes the boys as twin sons of Mars, and since they are presented without any traits that might differentiate them, they essentially

The ‘Lake of Lies’  55 serve as indistinguishable alternatives to each other. Rome would have been just the same if Remus had killed Romulus and the city were named Remora rather than Rome. Bergeaud, however, maps Haitian racial history onto his version of the tale. His Romulus was conceived in Africa by Marie and her beloved husband, and he was born on a ship during the Middle Passage. Remus, by contrast, is the son of the Colonist, who raped Marie in Saint-Domingue and later beat her to death. Romulus, that is, has purely African ancestry and very dark skin, whereas Remus, with his lighter skin, is a product of the violent colonial mixing of African and European parents within the Caribbean. These contrasting conception stories serve an obvious purpose in terms of Haitian history, but they also raise questions about the Roman legend. Livy opens the door to speculation about the twins’ paternity, suggesting that Rhea Silvia may simply have claimed that the father was a god in order to present a more respectable explanation for her ‘guilt’ (culpa, The History of Rome 1.4.2). Plutarch, in his biography of Romulus, gathers a wide range of birth stories, including a wild version in which the twins were the offspring of a female servant and a disembodied phantom phallus (daimonion phallos) that suddenly appeared in the king’s hall (Life of Romulus, 2–3). As many options as ancient sources present about the twins’ parentage, most accounts devote precious little attention to Rhea Silvia’s desires or consent. Only Ovid, who calls her Ilia, presents her perspective in any detail, and his account thoroughly condemns masculine sexual aggression. After giving birth, Ilia wanders barefoot and alone, bemoaning the ‘crime of Mars’ (delicta Martis, Amores 3.6.49–50), a phrase that starkly contrasts Livy’s comment about her ‘guilt’. When she is approached by Arnio, an amorous river god who exacerbates her trauma with his seductive words, she sobs, tries to flee, and ultimately throws herself into the river to die (67–82).23 Like Ovid’s Ilia, Bergeaud’s Marie comes to a tragic end, but his narrative places the responsibility for her suffering squarely within the human realm (rather than resorting to gods and personified rivers). Marie’s narrative arc – from happiness and consensual sex in Africa to a traumatic birth on the open sea to non-consensual sex within a colonized space to her pitiful murder – emphasizes the ‘symbolic death’, to use Orlando Patterson’s phrase, that saturated the entire project of European colonization (Patterson 1982). In this way, Bergeaud suggests the possibility of far more nuanced narratives about Rhea Silvia/Ilia than we find in the Roman record. Marie dies early in Bergeaud’s tale and reappears only in a few dream sequences, and Stella primarily provides Enlightenment inspiration. This means that the narrative quickly reduces to the masculinist interactions involving Romulus, Remus and the Colonist that leave little narrative space for Haitian womanhood. Particularly in this further simplified form, the set-up builds anticipation for the two critical events associated with the Roman brothers: the founding of a new state and the killing of Remus at the hands of Romulus. Bergeaud fosters this narrative expectation as soon as he gives the young men’s names, immediately after his discussion of the novel as a ‘lake of lies’. ‘The sons of the African woman – whom we introduce in this chapter under the names Romulus and Remus, less with the thought of establishing an analogy between these men and the historical twins and more because

56  The ‘Lake of Lies’ they were brothers . . .’ (17, with original emphasis).24 This passage ensures that the reader notices the historical precedent for these names, and Bergeaud then makes the facetious claim that the labels were merely chosen because the Roman pair were brothers. By drawing attention to the fact that the Roman brothers were twins whereas the Saint-Domingan brothers are not, he actually stresses points of difference over similarity, since twinness is a far rarer trait than is brotherhood. This emphasizing of difference fits with what Bergeaud has already laid out prior to divulging their names, namely that the brothers have importantly different conception and birth stories. As we will see, Bergeaud effectively hacks the script of the Roman myth, which moves from the indistinguishability of the twins toward the dominance of one over the other, and he reconfigures the story of Haiti in terms of a movement from difference (African blackness vs Caribbean hybridity) toward a national unity that transcends differences rooted in colorism.25 Another key difference between the Roman and Haitian versions of the myth of Romulus and Remus has to do with the source of their rivalry. In all Greek and Latin versions, the brothers come into conflict over their competing desires to control their new city. Such motivation is hardly absent from the colonial world, since the entire project was driven by the greedy desire to acquire resources.26 Thus, it is predictable that Bergeaud connects the brothers’ rivalry with colonization, but he moves the source of that rivalry away from the brothers themselves and places the blame on the European Colonist (68, with original ellipsis): Here is what the friends of the Colonist wanted:27 once they had deprived the brothers of the upright and frank men to whom they had become so attached, the Colonist’s allies hoped to send to Saint-Domingue scheming and faithless representatives who would fan the flames of passion and sow division between the two brothers. This division would then give birth to disorder, anarchy, and civil war . . . After the brothers had exhausted and harmed each other, France would return to impose new chains on SaintDomingue. France would say, as if with right: ‘I gave you this freedom believing that it would make you happy, but you only responded by destroying each other and wreaking havoc on the colony . . . ’28 Bergeaud here creates a scenario in which the rivalry between the brothers originates outside their relationship and within the Colonist’s scheming with France. This theme reflects the historical reality that France replaced their top civil and military officials in Saint-Domingue frequently within the Revolutionary period, and les grand blancs, the wealthy plantation owning class of whites in Saint-Domingue, sought to influence the choice of each new official in their favor whenever possible. That group did not support the abolitionist minded Étienne Poverel (1740–1795) and Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763–1813), the figures referred to as supporters of the brothers in this passage, and les grand blancs considered it a victory and an opportunity when these leaders were recalled to France in 1795.29 Bergeaud’s account of the source of the brothers’ rivalry contrasts importantly with the Roman myth, in which the twins work in virtual isolation from allies.

The ‘Lake of Lies’  57 Romulus and Remus seem to build a city by themselves without wider cooperation and without a population ready to inhabit their new civic space. Such heroic independence is not unusual in mythology, and it ensures that the brothers’ achievements, as well as their rivalry, derive wholly from their own competing ambitions. Their isolation is highlighted further in the typical description of Rome’s first challenge, namely the need to attract residents. Romulus opens the city as a sanctuary and thereby lures a group of men whose unsavory backgrounds prevent them from being welcomed elsewhere, and these men must then figure out how to find female counterparts, which they do via the story of the ‘Rape of the Sabines’.30 So whereas the Roman myth places the responsibility for the fratricidal violence squarely on Romulus and Remus themselves, Bergeaud insists that the Colonist and colonial France bear the blame. By locating the origins of the brothers’ conflict in the structural greed of the colonial system, Bergeaud depicts Romulus and Remus as innocent, if at times gullible, figures. But if his main literary objective is to tell a story that brings all Haitian populations together in brotherhood, he sometimes presents Remus, the figurehead for Bergeaud’s own Boyerist, mixed-race demographic, in a better light. The first example of this comes in his explanation of the origins of the Revolution. Early in the story, Remus is eager to avenge Marie’s death, but Romulus urges patience and caution. In a passage that begins to transform the colonial hierarchy of master-slave into a constitutional equality among all men, Remus pushes back by relating an encounter he had with the Colonist while returning home from the fields with his machete (18–19, with original emphasis on the word ‘man’):31 ‘Do you know that we are ridiculous to have believed for so long that our master is a giant? It is only fear that has the power to make objects grow in this way. I am truly ashamed; this so-called giant is a man like us.’ The illusion was broken: the solution to the Sphinx’s riddle had been found. He is a man like we are, so why does he claim rights that he denies to us?32 These lines effect a fascinating blending of Oedipal mythology with that of Rome’s founders.33 The mention of the Sphinx immediately activates that other mythical narrative and suggests that the meeting of father and armed son on a deserted road could easily have ended with the Oedipal crime of patricide. Indeed, Bergeaud sets the stage for that patricide but substitutes insight for violence.34 Goff and Simpson, in their analysis of the Oedipal connections among Sophocles, Ola Rotimi and Frantz Fanon, emphasize the Fanonian idea that the Oedipal dynamics imposed upon the colonized subject constitute a trap that prevents progress toward subjective personhood (2007, 99). The Haitian version of this story, however, presents the meeting between father and son (with both men aware of their biological relationship) as a path toward ‘the catharsis of revolutionary violence’ (100) only after the intellectual revolution afforded through the Sphinx’s riddle. In this way, Stella allows Remus (and, through him, Romulus as well) to progress toward post-colonial subjective personhood (and only later to revolutionary

58  The ‘Lake of Lies’ violence) through the realization that their perception of difference (he is a giant; we are men) was incorrect. The Colonist, Romulus and Remus all belong to the same category of being, and any differences in status must be attributed to the dynamics of colonial oppression. And yet this claim is weakened by the fact that Bergeaud grants this transformational insight only to Remus and not to Romulus, who, though not a biological son of the Colonist, is nonetheless a colonized subject and victim of the Colonist’s paternal failures. The brief intrusion of Oedipus’ mythology affords one brother a second heroic overlay that emphasizes his intellectual capabilities, since Remus, like the Greek Oedipus, manages to solve the riddle of the Sphinx.35 If this analysis is correct, then it may well be that Bergeaud himself had not completely rooted out colonial patterns of thought that persistently privileged lighter skin tones. Returning to the aspirational equity of the passage above, the first use of the word ‘man’ is italicized in Bergeaud’s manuscript, and that word is repeated (without italics) immediately after the invocation of the Sphinx. This lays heavy emphasis on the Greek Oedipus’ solution to the Sphinx’s riddle, the answer to which is ‘man’.36 The irony of Oedipus’ victory in the riddle contest is that he could divine the answer but not understand its implications for his own life in terms of his parentage and his place in the universe. For Bergeaud’s Oedipal Remus, however, the solution to the Sphinx’s riddle connects to the Enlightenment ideals espoused in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that was approved by France in 1789 as a key step in its own Revolution. Within the colonial context, however, the Sphinx’s ‘riddle’ refers to debates about how far these new rights should extend. France’s first solution to this issue was to restrict these rights narrowly to white Frenchmen, and Bergeaud connects the dots explicitly (19, with original emphasis on the word ‘idea’): This is the idea that, in 1790, armed Ogé and Chavannes against colonial tyranny. Ogé and Chavannes, two names dear to Liberty, two heroes immortalized in defeat as others are in victory, two apostles deified by their martyrdom. Is there a soul not moved by their memory, is there a voice not raised to glorify them? The battlefield of Revolution begins at their scaffold. We bow respectfully when passing these twinned tombs, placed at the doorstep of our history. Let us honor the memory of these two modern Spartans, just as valiant, just as unfortunate as those ancient defenders of Mount Oeta’s famous pass!37 The classical connections multiply further, as the legendary Roman Remus, already blended with the Greek mythological Oedipus, now becomes the Greek historical Leonidas at Thermopylae (i.e., ‘Mount Oeta’s famous pass’). Within the Haitian context, these lines place the beginning of the Revolution with the European Enlightenment, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and a shortlived rebellion led by Vincent Ogé (c. 1755–1791) and Jean-Baptiste Chavannes (1748–1791).

The ‘Lake of Lies’  59 Ogé and Chavannes were gens de couleur from wealthy families in SaintDomingue who owned coffee plantations worked by slaves. Ogé was in Paris at the start of the French Revolution, and inspired by the ideology of that movement, he lobbied the National Assembly for wider enfranchisement of his social class in Saint-Domingue.38 Rebuffed in France, he returned to the colony and joined Chavannes, a veteran of the Chasseurs-Volontaires, a French regiment of gens de couleur from Saint-Domingue that had fought in the American Revolution. Together they led an uprising that militated for voting rights for men like themselves but not for any change to the system of enslavement. Chavannes urged Ogé to include abolition among their goals, and had the rebellion been more successful, perhaps it would have endorsed a more broadly liberationist agenda at some point. As it turned out, however, the insurgency lasted only a few months, and both men were brutally tortured and publicly executed in February 1791. Their insurrection certainly contributed to destabilizing of the colonial system and their gruesome deaths became a testament to their cause, but in terms of the narrative ethics of Stella, Bergeaud situates the origins of the Haitian Revolution with wealthy, landowning, slave-owning, gens de couleur, who were educated in France, rather than with the uprising of enslaved Africans.39 Alternatively, Bergeaud could have emphasized or given equal emphasis to the origin story that leads back to Bois Caïman, the event in August 1791 that now regularly marks the start of the Haitian Revolution.40 At that event, enslaved and maroon people gathered to plan an uprising and participate in a Vodou ceremony. This very different (and today more standard) story of the beginning of the Revolution, which originates with the most oppressed and most purely African population of Saint-Domingue, is completely passed over by Bergeaud.41 In his symbolic terms, Remus, representing the gens de couleur, comes off as the smarter brother and the one more immediately responsible for starting the Revolution, which begins not from a slave uprising but, rather, from a debate about European political ideals and the voting rights of free gens de couleur. Bergeaud’s favoring of Remus is again on display later in the story when the Colonist, having already killed Marie, approaches the brothers in order to put his plan into action to sow discord between them (75): Remus could not hide the horror that his enemy inspired in him. Given his frank and indomitable nature, it was too difficult for the youngest of Marie’s sons to hide his feelings. They were visible despite his best efforts. Reconciliation was impossible. The Colonist understood this, and perfidiously tied his hopes instead to Romulus, whom he found more accessible.42 Although both brothers had witnessed the violent murder of their mother, the Colonist finds Romulus to be more receptive to his blandishments. Within Bergeaud’s symbolic narrative of the Revolution, this distinction makes little sense, unless we are to suppose that Remus has the greater grudge against the Colonist, since only he was born from the Colonist’s violent lust. Such an explanation does not seem

60  The ‘Lake of Lies’ convincing, and the problem becomes even murkier when translated into historical specifics. The scenario that Bergeaud is evoking here, clarified in one of his own footnotes, is the period after the 1795 Treaty of Basel, through which Spain ceded the eastern part of Hispaniola to France and gave up its military involvement in Saint-Domingue (a historical detail that would allow Haitian leaders, including Boyer and, later, Soulouque to justify their invasions of Santo Domingo). In the following years Louverture, the Romulus of the moment, surpasses Rigaud in terms of his power in the colony, and fosters positive relationships with French officials, such as Governor Laveaux.43 On this level, the symbolic and the historical fit together neatly, but the narrative ethics are problematic. Bergeaud’s framing of this era implies that Romulus, Louverture and the army of formerly enslaved people were the more gullible party who were being manipulated by white French elites, whereas Remus, Rigaud and the gens de couleur were more ardently anticolonialist by refusing to accommodate the Colonist’s plotting. Neither Louverture nor Rigaud was openly pushing for independence from France in this period, but the former was insistent on opposing any return to slavery. Bergeaud’s presentation here is, at best, somewhat inept and, at worst, positions him as supporting a vision for national brotherhood and equality that reserves a more privileged position for the Boyarist tradition of the mixed-race leadership.44 The third and final point at which Bergeaud may reveal a preference for Remus comes when the brothers have fallen into open conflict. This episode historically represents the War of the South (or ‘War of Knives’, 1799–1800), in which Louverture and Rigaud, having dealt for the moment with outside threats from Britain and France, fought for control of Saint-Domingue. Louverture, with the assistance of Dessalines and Christophe and leading an army primarily (though far from exclusively) comprised of the formerly enslaved blacks, defeated Rigaud and his lieutenants Pétion and Boyer, who commanded a force primarily (though far from exclusively) made up of mixed-race soldiers. The outcome of this encounter put Louverture in the strongest position of his career. His rivals decamped to France, and he oversaw the Constitution of 1801, which made him Governor General of Saint Domingue for life. Within Bergeaud’s symbolic narrative, this is also the scene in which anticipation peaks for Romulus to finally kill Remus, an outcome that would make sense in terms of Rigaud’s defeat. But this is not how Stella plays out. Whereas historical accounts dissect the reasons that Louverture triumphed in the War of the South, Bergeaud starts from the hypothesis that Remus (Rigaud) could have won the war but for unknown reasons chose not to press his advantage.45 ‘History leaves the field of mystery to the Novel. Pleased that it has only to tell the tale of the solemn act tied to Remus’s hidden motive, the Novel tells the secret story thus . . .’ (86).46 At this point Bergeaud conjures an encounter in the woods between Remus and a giant man whose ‘masculine face was similar to that of an alabaster statue’ (87).47 Although alabaster can appear in many contexts, the heavy emphasis throughout Stella on classical material suggests that Bergeaud may have had GrecoRoman statuary specifically in mind here. The mystical giant commands Remus not to fight back against Romulus’ attacks, and at the end of their encounter he reveals

The ‘Lake of Lies’  61 himself to be ‘The Genie of the Forest, the Spirit of the Nation!’ (89). The idea for this character may derive from language such as Dessalines’ invocation of ‘the angry Spirit of Haiti’ (le Génie irrité d’Haïti) from his ‘I have Avenged America’ speech from June 1804. Whatever the inspiration, Bergeaud narrates the outcome of the War of the South in terms of Romulus (Louverture) bending to the scheming control of the Colonist, while Remus (Rigaud) receives a privileged audience with the Spirit of the Nation, who has alabaster skin. This casts Remus (Rigaud) in doubly-noble light, because he could have won the war but willingly concedes to Romulus (Louverture) and because he has received a mystical or divine vision. Romulus (Louverture) again appears to be complicit with the cause of colonization, and the Spirit of the Nation may even have given his blessing to the ruling tradition of Pétion and Boyer over and against that of Dessalines, Christophe and, most recently in Bergeaud’s life, Soulouque.48 Perhaps Bergeaud’s intention in his portrayal of Romulus and Remus up to this point simply aimed to replicate Louverture’s rise to power in Saint-Domingue as an opponent of slavery who was not advocating a clear break from France. Whatever the case, the story now reaches the point when the fratricidal blow feels all but inevitable. Remus and Rigaud are both down and out, and one can hardly imagine a story about the Roman twins that does not eventually arrive at murderous violence. Yet as Bergeaud steers his Romulus (Louverture) into a position of clear military superiority over his brother, he brokers an emotional rapprochement between the Haitian pair that is shocking in terms of the Roman myth. Historically, this decision to have Romulus eschew the killing of Remus fits easily with the latter stages of the 1802 French re-invasion of Saint Domingue under Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc (1772–1802), which led to Dessalines and Pétion allying with one another against the French. Within Bergeaud’s story, however, this positive turn of events relies both on a shift of characters (Romulus is now played by Dessalines and Remus by Pétion) and a glossing over of the betrayal of Louverture, who leaves the colony for France where he will die in prison. Stella’s continuity in focusing on Romulus as a symbolic figure thus downplays the rupture represented by the fall of the Romulan Louverture. Leclerc arrived in February with a French armada so massive that its victory seemed assured. He swelled his ranks further by recruiting both black and mixedrace troops, lured with the promise of amnesty and (for the formerly enslaved) guarantees against re-enslavement, a gambit that worked in part because Rigaud, Pétion and Boyer, as well as Louverture’s sons Isaac and Placide, had arrived with Leclerc, and even Henri Christophe joined Leclerc’s side in April. On May 6, Louverture and Leclerc agreed to a cease-fire, in which the former would retire and acknowledge the latter’s authority in exchange for the amnesty of Louverture’s top lieutenants. In June, on the grounds that the stipulations of their agreement had not been upheld, Leclerc had Louverture arrested and sent to France, where he died in the Alpine Fort-de-Joux in 1803, and Dessalines followed Christophe in shifting to Leclerc’s side. Just as it seemed that Leclerc’s mission could not fail, news arrived to SaintDomingue in August of Napoleon’s May 1802 decree revoking the 1794 abolition

62  The ‘Lake of Lies’ of slavery in the colonies. Technically, Napoleon’s decree did not apply to SaintDomingue, since Sonthonax had decreed abolition in 1793 and the end of slavery in the colony was not, for that reason, determined by the law of 1794. Yet fears of re-enslavement rose just as cases of yellow fever were breaking out within the French army.49 Rumors of a reimposition of slavery and the outbreak of disease quickly grew into major problems, and the French cause was riddled with defections and deaths. In a move of cruel desperation, Leclerc proposed a genocidal purge in a letter to Napoleon written on October 7, 1802: ‘Here is my opinion on this country: We must destroy all the blacks in the mountains – men and women – and spare only the children under twelve years of age. We must destroy half of those in the plains and must not leave a single colored person in the colony who has worn an epaulette.’50 Presumably such thinking contributed to the mid-October agreement between Dessalines and Pétion (now playing the parts of Romulus and Remus, respectively) to form the Army of the Indigènes and an alliance against Leclerc.51 This event represents the tipping point of the Revolutionary era, because it established a pact between the major racialized military factions to resist not just re-enslavement but also French control of Saint-Domingue. In Stella this is also the critical moment when Romulus and Remus re-write their own Roman myth by eschewing fratricide and when Bergeaud achieves his most dramatic counter-reading of the classical canon in the service of anti-colonialism and Haitian nationalism.52 On November 2, Leclerc succumbed to yellow fever, but his plan for a genocidal strategy lived on with his replacement, the Vicomte de Rochambeau (1755–1813, son of the Comte de Rochambeau, who had supported the cause of the colonies against the British in the American Revolution). Rochambeau paired Leclerc’s strategic plan for mass murder with (seemingly) a personal predilection for sadism, as witnessed in his plans to use dogs to regain military control. Bergeaud conveys the horror of this strategy, amply documented in historical records but also embellished into chilling legend, in terms of Roman blood-sport.53 According the version told in Stella, Rochambeau created a demonstration that he presented at a festive event for his officers and their wives before he unleashed his dogs in battle. ‘To show off his dogs’ talent, Rochambeau transformed a courtyard into an amphitheater with terraced seating like in the times when Romans attended the battles of gladiators and ferocious beasts’ (146).54 He tied a victim to a post and, as sometimes happened in such Roman spectacles, the animals initially showed no interest in attacking the human.55 Only when a soldier stabbed the victim did the smell of blood prompt the hungry dogs to fulfill their role. When used in war, the dogs created a great deal of terror but again failed to produce the focused effects that Rochambeau expected, and Bergeaud may have been thinking of the Greek myth of Actaeon, the hunter transformed into a stag and devoured by his own dogs, when he wrote that ‘the dogs treated the French as if they were the true enemies’ (149).56 Rochambeau continued to seek ways to gain the advantage, but on November 18, 1803 Dessalines oversaw the definitive victory over the French forces at the Battle of Vertières, after which time the success of the Revolution became a foregone conclusion. Bergeaud uses his novel as an opportunity to assert that the triumph of Enlightenment ideals was accomplished in Haiti and to critique France’s failure to extend

The ‘Lake of Lies’  63 its ambitious plan in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to its entire empire.57 Haiti’s great philosophical and national achievement, Bergeaud insists, also came about in conjunction with a victory of Christian values. This theme can be found throughout the novel, as when Stella is described as ‘a messenger from God, an angel with white wings, a chaste look, a virtuous body’ (28) or when the final celebration of independence is coded as ‘the baptism of religion: [the victory] was now Christian, which is to say, everlasting’ (173).58 Indeed, it would be difficult to find a passage of Stella that could disprove Bergeaud’s Christian commitments. In terms of the Africanist perspective that the spiritual impetus for the Revolution had more to do with Vodou and its West African antecedents, the easiest conclusion is that Bergeaud is actively denying such a possibility, especially through his choice to excise Bois Caïman from his account. Nevertheless, I believe that we should explore an alternative to this position. Bergeaud’s description of his chosen genre as a ‘lake of lies’ destabilizes confidence in any obvious or ‘surface’ inferences and urges a search for deeper, more secretive meanings.59 So too does his willingness to write back to ancient Rome by overturning the seemingly inevitable fratricidal conclusion of the myth of Romulus and Remus. Before leaving Stella, therefore, I want to suggest one further way that we might understand the Italian twins’ role in this historical drama. Because of the paucity of information about Bergeaud’s personal life, it is easier to begin with a wider perspective on this era. Although Enlightenment philosophy played a large part in the run-up to the Revolution, especially with the likes of Ogé, this history can be told differently. In C. L. R. James’s analysis of the Haitian Revolution, he describes Vodou as ‘the medium of the conspiracy’ (1963, 86). More recently, Vivaldi Jean-Marie has argued that ‘Vodou cosmology granted the slave communities of Saint-Domingue the religious unity, language and achievement of a common destiny as the requisites of state formation and the conviction of universal humanity that made the Haitian Revolution a successful critique and expansion of the Enlightenment’s ideals’ (2018, 58).60 I suggest that it is possible to read Bergeaud’s novel as an early articulation of Jean-Marie’s point (whether intended in this way by Bergeaud or not).61 Louverture and nearly all the most prominent Revolutionary Haitian leaders were regularly depicted in European garb, and in many ways Louverture seems to have aspired to be thoroughly French.62 In line with this, he avowed a Christian faith and in 1800 issued an edict forbidding the practice of Vodou in SaintDomingue. This religious stance must be understood in terms of the political capital attached to Christianity throughout and beyond the Revolution. There is plenty of evidence to support the idea that Louverture was a devout Roman Catholic, but some sources claim that he also practiced Vodou.63 Indeed, it would be overly simplistic to see Christianity and Vodou as mutually exclusive alternatives (or even as internally homogenous religions). Inasmuch as Christianity was aligned with European hegemony, however, such exclusivity might be expected from the perspective of European Christians, but Vodou, subaltern in terms of power and syncretic in terms of practice, could easily code switch. Kate Ramsey has confirmed this in her strong argument that Louverture’s suppression of Vodou was first

64  The ‘Lake of Lies’ and foremost a politically motivated act (2011, 48).64 The issue of religion in Haiti, which persists today, freights religious associations with broader cultural import. Endorsements of Christianity can align with a colonial playbook that, in many cases, leads to accessing other modes of power, such as foreign aid, education, and career advancement. By contrast, commitments to Vodou can imply Caribbean or Africanist agendas, which, because of anti-blackness, can set communities at odds with outsiders, particularly with predominantly white Evangelical Christian groups in the U.S.65 Into this rhetorical opposition between Christianity and Vodou, the religion and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome presents a conceptual middle space. The polytheistic Greco-Roman pantheon shares basic structural similarities with the lwa of Vodou, and yet it also had become harmonized with Christianity, particularly during the European Renaissance. Any theological challenges from the likes of Zeus and Athena were deemed defunct, and what was left was an aesthetic and narrative playground of non-Christian but nonetheless acceptable divinities. In the case of Bergeaud’s novel, therefore, we might find, intentionally encoded by the author or through an individual reader’s creative resolution of this ‘fuzzy connection’, a Haitian form of translatio studii (literally, ‘handing over of learning’).66 This term, always evocative of the more political translatio imperii (‘handing over of hegemony’), originated in the European Middle Ages and articulated a concept whereby the greatness of ancient Mediterranean civilizations became the inheritance of a later culture. In his Cligès (c. 1170), for example, Chrétien de Troyes bluntly claimed that Greek learning had been passed to Rome and then to France. In Stella, we might see a crafty version of this played out under the watchful gaze of Euro-Christian colonial culture. Bergeaud makes no mention (directly or through his symbolic code) to the Bois Caïman ritual or to the role of Vodou in Haitian culture. In light of this silence and given the obvious Christian connections of his title character, Bergeaud may have written out the realities of Vodou and replaced them with the parallel Greco-Roman strain of polytheistic culture that was more acceptable to European tastes. This would explain his recourse to the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus in the first place, since this basis for his narrative is not only unnecessary, it is an intentionally awkward fit.67 Recall that when Bergeaud introduced his Romulus and Remus, he claimed to use these names merely because the two were brothers, even though the trait of twinness was critical in the Roman context and completely absent from the Haitian. This line of reading would also make sense of Bergeaud’s conflation of Stella, the idealization of beauty, virginal purity, and divine wisdom, with the figure of Athena. Greco-Roman polytheism thus would serve as a high-status cultural blind behind which Bergeaud could hide the potential liabilities, in the eyes of the wider Francophone world, of Haiti’s Africanist identity. On this reading, the ‘secret of the destiny’ of Haiti, hidden beneath the surface of Bergeaud’s ‘lake of lies’, is the same as James’ ‘medium of the conspiracy’, an African (through Marie) spirituality negotiated through a Caribbean encounter with Europe that is mediated through Roman mythology.

The ‘Lake of Lies’  65 If Bergeaud was consciously overlaying Greco-Roman polytheism onto Haitian Vodou, his intentions may have been either anti-African (by writing Vodou out of his history) or covertly supportive of Vodou (by offering a coded narrative space for it). Although the evidence prevents any firm conclusion about Bergeaud’s intentions, another Haitian author overtly paired the Vodou and Greek pantheons roughly a century later. By the middle of the 20th century, pan-Africanism and the négritude movement had made Vodou less of a cultural liability among Haitian elites. Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, the populist leader who was elected president of Haiti in 1957 and who quickly became a brutally repressive dictator, was open about his support for Vodou and even dressed in the manner of the powerful spirit Baron Samedi. A few years before Duvalier’s election, Félix Morisseau-Leroy became a leading champion of the Haitian Creole language by composing a version of Sophocles’ Antigone in Creole. This is a fascinating text for a host of reasons, and I analyze it in detail in Chapter 6, but in terms of Stella, I want to highlight the fact that Morisseau-Leroy draws an explicit connection between the spirits of Vodou and the Greek gods. If Morisseau-Leroy could articulate such a permeability between these two religious systems, then it is possible that such an approach was present but more subtly expressed among earlier generations of classically educated Haitian authors too.68 Marie and Stella in Stella By way of conclusion, I  would like to turn to one final element in Bergeaud’s novel that highlights his manipulation of classical material, namely the portrayal of female bodies. Whereas the male characters receive little physical description (aside from the important contrast between the skin color of Romulus and Remus), both Marie the African and Stella are fetishized in terms of their appearance, less through physical details than in terms of the overall aesthetic impact of their bodily presence. As he praises both women’s appearance for their specifically classical beauty, Bergeaud’s masculinist gaze stakes a claim that such classical somatic ideals are equally at home in European, African and Caribbean idioms. Bergeaud’s transcendent description of Stella seems to blend elements of the Greek Helen, though less overtly sexualized, and Athena (28, with original ellipsis): At times, you have seen her in your dreams: she is a messenger from God, an angel with white wings, a chaste look, a virtuous body. She is vaporous like a shadow and ethereal like the transparent mist of the cosmos; a faint perfume of goodness – the goodness that sent her – radiates from her exquisite form. This angel is at once the interpreter and the image of benevolence. Say, is there a human being who reminds you of this celestial vision? Would you dare compare her to any beauty on earth without fear of desecration? .  .  . Well, the young woman wrested from the flames [of the Colonist’s mansion] was this angel of your dreams. Everything in her possessed a grace, a perfection divine. Neither the painter’s brush nor the sculptor’s chisel has

66  The ‘Lake of Lies’ ever given life to something that could even approach the poetry that she embodied.69 Throughout the novel, Bergeaud provides further details: ‘A sovereign air of dignity emanated from her brow and enhanced the brilliance of her harmonious and pure features. Her blond hair glistened in the sun like a golden frame about her face’ (29); ‘. . . she was the very embodiment of the goddess Athena’ (41); ‘the sublime incarnation of the divine’ (80); she is ‘like the Priestess of Victory’ (172), and when, at the end, she finally ascended into heaven, ‘Everyone followed her path with tearful eyes until the moment she disappeared into space, leaving behind a long furrow of gold’ (175).70 In a nutshell, she is the idealization of European feminine beauty, which has the power to rouse and inspire the men around her. The Colonist, lustful but not replicating the sexual violence he inflicted on Marie, repeatedly begs Stella to marry him, but her persistent refusal says more about Bergeaud’s symbolic commentary on the French Enlightenment than it does about gender or sexuality. Neither Romulus nor Remus shows any erotic attraction, and their initial plan to sacrifice her in recompense for Marie’s death (on the incorrect assumption that she was the Colonist’s daughter) quickly gives way to pure devotion. Stella’s appearance suggests classical aesthetics, especially in Bergeaud’s comparison of her to Athena and to works of visual art (these are unspecified but suggestive of Greco-Roman statuary). As such, she also evokes neoclassical ideals, that, by the time of Stella’s publication, would have been familiar to followers of Parisian art, such as Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of Niobe’ (c. 1772), Anne-Louis Girodet’s ‘Mademoiselle Lange as Venus’ (1798), or Pierre-Narcisse Guèrin’s ‘Morpheus and Iris’ (1811). Marie the African receives similar praise, though her early death means that she receives fewer such blazons (11): Marie – the young mother – was black like her older son. She had reached that age where beauty becomes genuine without losing its charms. Her visage was melancholy and soft, with eyes reminiscent of the gazelle of her native land and a mouth set with shining pearls; her delicate and fine skin wore the polish of marble, thanks to the continual effects of her work in the fields. Such were the distinctive traits of this African face. The exposed shoulders of the young woman had the purity of classical models, and her flowing clothes left to guesswork the form that was paired with her graceful physiognomy.71 Such a harmonization of classical and African feminine beauty was not original to Bergeaud in the colonial era, even though European colonial powers had fostered the idea that classical values were virtually synonymous with ‘European’ and antithetical to ‘African’.72 Yet many earlier colonial examples of classical-African beauty fell into egregiously exploitative modes, as with Thomas Stothard’s etching ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus, from Angola to the West Indies’ (1801). Indeed, Stothard’s image, inspired by Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’, amounts to precisely the form of exploitive objectification employed by Bergeaud’s rapacious Colonist.

The ‘Lake of Lies’  67 Stothard’s depiction first appeared in the third edition of Bryan Edward’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1801) but is more regularly associated today with ‘The Sable Venus: An Ode’ (1793), a poem by Anglican priest Isaac Teale that celebrates the habit (irresistible and harmless, according to Teale) of raping enslaved black women. Teale’s words and Stothard’s image extol the beauty of black female bodies but in a way that renders them open to the sexual domination with impunity by (especially white, European) men. Regulus Allen summarizes the idea of the ‘Black Venus’ in this way: ‘the invocation of black beauty ultimately is employed to show the beauty and superiority of whiteness’ (2011, 667). Allen’s article is part of a strong recent trend of black feminists confronting and redressing the legacy of the Sable Venus.73 Against the likes of Stothard, Teale and Bergeaud’s Colonist, Bergeaud himself does something importantly different. To be sure, his perspective is objectifyingly masculinist in his physical descriptions of both Marie and Stella, but he does not valorize one over the other. Rather, the two female figures represent the twin sources of Haitian independence in Bergeaud’s thinking – mother Africa and European Enlightenment properly embodied. Furthermore, in the pitiable scene in which the Colonist murders Marie, her sons keep her bloodied dress, and Bergeaud brings this memento back at the end of the novel as the literal and figurative origin of the Haitian flag. This scene comes just after the reunion of Romulus and Remus (here, Dessalines and Pétion), and the rousing discussion of the flag suggests the formation of the Army of Indigènes not long before the ultimate victory at Vertières (122–23, and cp. 152–53):74 An entire past lived in this souvenir of affection and grief [i.e., Marie’s dress]. In it, the brothers had both their mother and her agonizing death in front of them. They connected the present to this cursed past, and experienced new feelings of resentment provoked by the attacks that their mother’s assassin added to his previous record. They eagerly grabbed the blood-tinged dress to pursue the sinister project that, earlier, had been the subject of the following exchange: ‘Crime made this garment a sign of our despair. May crime now receive it as its own funeral shroud!’ In the middle of the camp, attached to the end of a mast . . . the African’s dress was raised as a somber flag. Its bloody folds unfurled in the breeze. Later another color, borrowed from the azure sky, was placed next to the first color that signaled vengeance. This addition was intended either to soften the flag’s sinister aspect or to recall the duality of Haitian Independence – and independence that would be accomplished by the common devotion of two individuals with differently colored skin, an independence that Providence would bless, creating another society under the auspices of Liberty.75 As Bergeaud explains the red of the Haitian flag in terms of the blood on Marie’s dress, his description engages two Roman legends that, like the myth of Romulus and Remus, are about the early foundations of Rome. Earlier in terms of Roman chronology is the scene at the end of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Aeneas, the Trojan

68  The ‘Lake of Lies’ hero who has arrived in Italy to build a new society and reconnect with his distant Italian ancestry, has bested his rival, Turnus, in battle. His adversary, the leader of the local resistance to Aeneas’ ambitions, is alive but defeated. He begs for mercy, and Aeneas seems poised to allow his foe to live. But then Aeneas notices the sword-belt of his young comrade Pallas, whom Turnus had slain and whose armor he had worn into battle as a trophy. At the sight of this object, which Virgil describes as impressum nefas, ‘stamped with murder’, Aeneas kills the helpless Turnus in a fit of rage. This is the final event of the Aeneid and, like the killing of Remus by Romulus, it represents an ethically and emotionally tormented origin story for Rome. As Bergeaud follows a similar pattern of having his warriors react passionately to the sight of the memento of a beloved person killed by their enemy just before a decisive military victory, Marie’s death is elevated to a national tragedy and the emotional lynchpin of liberation. He may also be suggesting that the ethical complexity of Aeneas’ choice to kill an unarmed foe begging for his life is similar to Dessalines’ 1804 order to exterminate any French people still residing in Haiti, an event that Bergeaud elsewhere describes and condemns in graphic terms (180–182). Later in the story of Rome, at the end of a semi-legendary period in which the city was ruled by kings, another founding act of revolutionary violence takes place. The last king of Rome, the aptly named Tarquinius Superbus, ‘Tarquin the Arrogant’, becomes enamored of the wife of Brutus, a leading citizen whose name returns later in Roman history through the assassin of Julius Caesar. Like Bergeaud’s Colonist, Tarquinius rapes Lucretia, who becomes the fetishized flash-point of revolution. Lucretia assembles her male kin, explains what has happened, and then, unable to live with the shame and trauma and using her boldness as proof of her honesty, she kills herself in front of them. Roused to passionate anger by the sexual violation of a beloved woman and by the sight of her bloody resolve, Brutus leads an uprising that ousts the kings and ushers in the Roman Republic. Again, the Roman story pattern is suggestive of the way in which Marie’s death and the physical emblem of her bloody dress, strengthen her sons’ resolve to liberate their country from an oppressive regime. These three stories about the inspiration for national, revolutionary violence (Marie’s dress, the sword-belt of Pallas, Lucretia’s suicide) form a complex emotional template. But as a final comment on Bergeaud’s Stella, I want to emphasize the manner in which his description of Marie’s living body draws upon neoclassical tropes in ways that are themselves, from a colonial European perspective, revolutionary. Marie’s ‘black’ skin, with ‘the polish of marble’ was distinctively ‘African’ and perfectly aligned with ‘classical models’ (11). His reference to her ‘graceful physiognomy’, furthermore, sounds a direct rebuttal to the neoclassical aesthetic analyses not only of the likes of Winkelmann and Lessing, who were operating within a thoroughly Eurocentric epistemology, but also of the far more overtly racist Josiah Nott (1804–1873) and George Gliddon (1809–1857).76 The latter pair, an American anthropologist and Egyptologist, respectively, typify the most egregious form of scientific racism, and in 1854 (just five years before the publication of Stella) they published an image juxtaposing the busts of Apollo Belvedere

The ‘Lake of Lies’  69 (a Roman, second-century BCE marble sculpture), a ‘Negro’, and a ‘young chimpanzee’ in their polygenist anthropological study of the various human races, as they were then understood.77 Bergeaud challenges the Eurocentric aesthetic valorization of whiteness and degradation of blackness by correcting the historical record. European neoclassicism, rooted in the idea of an exclusive translatio studii, asserts a uniquely European claim on the legacy of Greece and Rome. Against this, the comment by Ali Mazrui bears repeating form the Introduction: ‘In an act of cultural piracy Europe has stolen classical Greece. But later, in an act of territorial annexation, “Europe stole the world”. And in the colonies which she annexed she passed on the message of Greece’ (1978, 96). Mazrui’s statement encapsulates the classical ideology of colonialism, but it also effects a counter-reading of that ideology through its echoing of a Horatian image. In the first century BCE, the Roman poet Horace quipped that ‘conquered Greece captured the cruel victor [i.e., Rome] and brought her arts to rustic Italy’ (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio, Epistles 2.1.156–57). But whereas Horace produced a paradox showing that the military loser can be the cultural winner, Mazrui frames the enduring prestige of ancient Greece and the triumph of European culture as the results of a two-stage European theft of Greek culture and global territory. Bergeaud’s depiction of Marie seems to anticipate Mazrui’s point, and he challenges typical European aesthetic assumptions, just as the existence of Haiti challenges European-U.S. assumptions about the fulfillment of Enlightenment ideals in the American and French Revolutions. Notes 1 For discussions of Haitian-Dominican relations during this period, see Matibag 2003, 81–109, Eller 2016, and Ford 2020, 155–188. 2 As noted in the Introduction, I  do not capitalize terms for racial categories as they were socially constructed in Haitian history. In Saint-Domingue, the label gens de couleur covered a wide range of skin-tones and family histories and could be applied to anyone non-white and free. It is, therefore, not strictly a racial category but a racialeconomic grab-bag. That term falls out of use after Independence, and it is largely replaced by the objectional term ‘mulatto’. Rather than perpetuating the problems associated with that word (which ultimately derives from the Latin word for mule), I refer to those individuals traditionally assigned to racial statuses between white and black as mixed. In quotations of other authors, I replicate the terminology and capitalization of the source text. 3 Curtis and Mucher provide a succinct introduction in Bergeaud 2015, and Daut 2015, 412–458 offers a deeper dive, including the argument that Stella was composed jointly or entirely by Madame Bergeaud (413–14, fn 2). Perhaps the heaviest emphasis in Daut’s interpretation falls on Bergeaud’s refusal to accept standard racialized evaluations of Haitian history: ‘. . . in Stella, Bergeaud labors to prove that all Haitians were actually “mixed,” but not in the biological sense offered by naturalist travel writers and other proponents of pseudoscientific theories of “race.” Haitian society was “mixed,” that is to say diverse, because one could find people of various skin colors even in the same family . . . This diversity of mixtures . . . was precisely what made the country beautiful’ (447). 4 Daut 2015, 412–458.

70  The ‘Lake of Lies’ 5 France outlawed slavery in April 1794, but Napoleon reimposed it in many of the colonies in 1802. Sonthonax, the French Commissioner to Saint-Domingue, had anticipated (and perhaps precipitated) the 1794 abolition by freeing the enslaved population of the colony in August 1793. 6 On this passage and its engagement with earlier Haitian literary models, see Daut 2015, 428–29. Hoffmann 1984, 113–114 likens this passage to a similar discussion about the role of poetry in Alfred de Vigny’s play Chatterton (1835). 7 English and French quotations follow Bergeaud 2015 and 1878, respectively. L’Histoire est un fleuve de vérité qui poursuit son cours majestueux à travers les âges. Le Roman est un lac menteur dont l’étendu se dissimule sous terre; calme et pur à sa surface, il cache quelquefois dans ses profondeurs le secret de la destinée des peoples, des cités, comme le lac Asphaltite. L’Histoire, écho sonore des ouragans humains, en reproduit fidèlement les bruits et les fureurs. Pour affronter ces tempêtes et conduire à bon port nos héros sauvages, il faudrait autre chose qu’un frêle canot d’écorce; et d’ailleurs, sauvages nous-mêmes, nous n’avons ni carte, ni boussole, ni connaissances nautiques. A vous donc l’orageuse mer, pilote expérimenté, à nous le lac tranquille; en nous abandonnant au soufle de Dieu, peut-être arriverons-nous au terme de notre course, guidé par l’étoile de la patrie! (19–20). 8 ἀλλὰ τούτῳ διαφέρει, τῷ τὸν μὲν τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τὸν δὲ οἷα ἂν γένοιτο. διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν· ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει. For recent discussions of this passage, see Carli 2010 and Gallop 2018. 9 Hoffman 1984, 114 makes a similar point by asserting that Bergeaud here ‘claims for the novelist the vision that the romantic school reserved for the poet’. 10 The idea of ‘fuzzy connections’ derives from Hardwick 2011, and it has been developed in related ways by Greenwood’s idea of omnilocality (Greenwood 2013) and Butler’s image of striation (2016). In many ways these notions all form extensions of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Signifyin(g) Monkey (1998). On Lucian’s post-classical legacy, see Richter 2005 and the essays in Ligota and Panizza 2007. 11 ἓν γὰρ δὴ τοῦτο ἀληθεύσω λέγων ὅτι ψεύδομαι. 12 Les pleurs des deux frères redoublèrent, 57. The French edition contains a footnote indicating that the Latin phrase is from Ovid, though without a complete citation, and this rendering: ‘Les larmes ne sont pas moins éloquentes que les paroles.’ 13 Allez, soyez prudents, ne vous aventurez pas trop. S’il vous arrivait de rencontrer l’ennemi en nombre, évitez de la combattre . . . (71). 14 I analyze several, though not all, of these possible connections later in this chapter. 15 We do not know what Bergeaud’s aspirations were for his readership, but his exile and the publication of his novel in Paris suggest his primary Haitian readership would have been among those whose wealth and education put them in regular contact with the Haitian community in France, where Boyer himself died less than a decade before the Ardouin’s publication of Stella. 16 Sans avoir la gravité sévère de l’histoire (v). 17 A point reiterated by Hoffman 1984, 116. Les grands blancs were the white plantation owners (as opposed the petits blancs, the non-plantation owning whites). Les grands blancs often resided in France, where they were the driving force behind the Massiac Club. 18 Bergeaud 2015, 28; 1878, 39, with a footnote that reads ‘La colère est une courte folie. (Hor.)’. The line is from Horace’s Epistles (1.2.62), published about 11 BCE. 19 In terms of the gender dynamics of the novel, Daut 2015 notes that Marie reprises the role of Zélie, from Victor Séjour’s macabre short-story ‘Le mulâtre’ (1837), which she analyzes in terms of the melodramatic trope of the ‘tragic mulatta’ (414) and also that

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20 21

22

23 24 25

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Bergeaud’s endorsement of racial mixing and hybridity as a positive social value undermine the racist logic of corrosive narratives about the tragic or vengeful ‘mulatto/a’ (441). Article 3 of the 1805 Constitution declares that all Haitians are brothers. Article 14 declared all Haitians to be black. On the Haitian fulfillment of French Enlightenment ideals, Anna Julia Cooper’s 1925 doctoral thesis made much the same claim in an academic register. Buck-Morss argues that ‘the black Jacobins of Saint Domingue surpassed the metropole in actively realizing the Enlightenment goal of human liberty, seeming to give proof that the French Revolution was not simply a European phenomenon, but world-historical in its implications’ (2009, 39). The very idea that the Enlightenment was a purely European phenomenon has been challenged from various perspectives. James 1963, 47–50, for example, showed how colonial wealth fostered a new maritime bourgeoisie that sought expanded rights as a consequence of their profits gained through the slave economy. Graeber and Wengrow devote a chapter to the ‘indigenous critique’ in which French explorers documented and brought back to France the criticisms of European lifestyle and social organizations articulated by Native Americans; on this reading, the European Enlightenment has roots in North American indigeneity (2021, 27–77). See Sumner 2005 on the Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599–1692), who articulated many ideas recognizable in the European Enlightenment in his Hatata (Inquiry), which was formulated in 1630 (published 1667) – seven years prior to Descartes’s Discours de la méthode. In her analysis of Stella Daut 2015 understands Bergeaud as suggesting ‘that Haitians must forget certain aspects of the nation’s origin story’ (451), but by using Romulus and Remus to connect Haiti’s origins to that of Rome’s, he is also urging Haitians to remember not just certain details but also to contrast origin stories rooted in Roman fratricide and Haiti’s avoidance of that founding crime. For a deeper analysis of the myth of Rhea Silvia/Ilia, see Conners 1994. Les fils de l’Africaine, – que nous introduisons dans ce chapitre sous les noms de Romulus et de Rémus, – moins avec la pensée d’établir une analogie quelconque entre eux et ces jumeaux de l’histoire, que parce qu’ils étaient frères . . . (20). Daut 2015, 441–444 finds a model for Bergeaud’s vision of the rivalry between Louverture and Rigaud as fratricidal in Saint-Rémy’s characterization of this relationship in his Vie de Toussaint-L’Ouverture. Starkly contrasting with my reading of Stella, Hoffman 1984, 116 largely accepts Bergeaud’s explanation for recourse to the Roman brothers, saying that the difference in biological relationships is ‘irrelevant’ and that the key point is that both sets of brothers found a state after ‘fratricidal struggle’. Derek Walcott develops this theme in Omeros (1990) through the various ways in which he toys with Saint Lucia being the ‘Helen’ of the West Indies, since ‘she’, like Helen of Greek mythology, was the beauty who attracted too many suitors, had too many husbands, and became the flashpoint for violent struggles to control her. Curtis and Muchar in Bergeaud 2015, ad loc., note that these friends stand for the Massiac Club, the Parisian group that lobbied on behalf of slavery and the rights of colonial planters, i.e., les grand blancs. Voici ce qu’espéraient les amis du Colon: Une fois que les deux frères seraient privés de l’homme qui les avait habitués à sa droiture et à sa franchise, ils espéraient qu’on enverrait dans la colonie des agents intrigants et de mauvaise foi pour attiser le feu de leurs passions et semer la division parmi eux; que de cette division naîtraient le désordre, l’anarchie, la guerre civile . . . , et qu’après que les deux frères se seraient épuisés, mutilés, la France viendrait leur imposer de nouvelle chaînes, leur dire, avec toute l’apparence du droit: ‘Je vous ai rendu libres croyant vous render heureux; mais vous n’avez profité de ce bienfait que pour vous entre-détruire et bouleverser la colonie . . .’ 114.

72  The ‘Lake of Lies’ 29 Polverel and Sonthonax were the two leading members of a French delegation charged with restoring order in Saint-Domingue in 1792. Both men had abolitionist ideals but political pressures may have hastened their move to abolish slavery in the colony in August 1793, six months before the French National Assembly officially declared emancipation on February  4, 1794 (a move that would later be reversed by Napoleon in 1802). The pair were recalled to France in 1795, in part through the machinations of les grands blancs, i.e., Bergeaud’s Colonist. Sonthonax would return to Saint-Domingue in 1796–1797 until Louverture facilitated his election to the French legislature, thereby ensuring that one of his principal rivals would leave the colony for good. Sonthonax’s departure represents an important step in Louverture’s consolidation of power. 30 Livy, The History of Rome, 1.8–10. The word ‘rape’ here translates the homonymous Latin verb rapio, the semantic range of which spans ‘take’, ‘acquire’, ‘abduct’, ‘kidnap’, and, with all its modern connotations, ‘rape’. As such, the appropriate translation in any case must rely on context. Here, it seems clear that Romulus’ plan is a large-scale version of marriage by abduction, a practice that overlaps significantly with the modern concept of rape. 31 Kjærgård 2020 reads this passage in terms of its description of decolonizing the minds (in the spirit of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1986) of the two brothers and as response to Rousseau’s ‘narrative parable’ in his Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781). This is a wonderful insight that aligns with my own thesis that Remus is given pride of place by being the one to (first) experience this decolonizing recognition and (second) share it with Romulus. 32 ‘Sais-tu que nous sommes ridicules d’avoir cru si longtemps notre maître un géant? La peur seule a le pouvoir de grossir à ce point les objets. J’en ai vraiment honte; ce prétendu géant est un homme comme nous.’ / Le prestige n’existait plus: le mot de l’énigme du Sphinx était trouvé. / Il est un homme comme nous, pourquoi s’arroge-t-il les droits qu’il nous conteste?, 22 33 Oedipal interpretations of colonial dynamics abound, since the perverted familial relationships of colonial hierarchies breed revolutionary violence. Two dramatic fictions composed in the U.S. but deeply engaged with the Haitian Revolution make this connection overt: Victor Séjour’s short story ‘Le Mulâtre’ (‘The Mulatto’, 1837) and Rita Dove’s play The Darker Face of the Earth (1994, revised 1996). Daut 2015, 332–379 discusses the Oedipal themes of Séjour’s story, and her interpretation draws importantly on Hathaway 1989. For a discussion of Dove’s play in terms of its Greek themes, see Cook and Tatum 2010, 322–340. Goff and Simpson (2007, 78–134) present an important analysis of the Oedipal themes in Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame (1971), and their chapter draws heavily on Fanon’s approach to the Oedipal dynamics of colonization and decolonization. 34 The standard myth relates that Oedipus killed his father, Laius, as the two encountered one another at a crossroads between Thebes, where Laius was king, and Delphi, the location of Apollo’s most famous oracle. Oedipus, who did not at this point know that he had been adopted as an infant, had just received the oracular news that he would one day kill his father and marry his mother. In hopes of avoiding such a fate, he chose not to return to his adoptive home in Corinth. When he encountered Laius, who was seeking oracular help about how to deal with the Sphinx that was plaguing Thebes, neither man understood the bond between them. 35 Du Bois 1896, 199 describes the legacy of slavery in the U.S., which he describes as a ‘critical, momentous, and pressing’ issue, in this way: ‘The riddle of the Sphinx may be postponed, it may be evasively answered now; sometime it must be fully answered.’ 36 The riddle asks: ‘what goes on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three at evening?’ Presumably this riddle circulated orally from an early date, since it seems to be implied in the Sophoclean tragedy even though it is only recorded (in various forms) by later sources.

The ‘Lake of Lies’  73 37 Telle est l’idée qui arma, en 1790, Ogé et Chavannes contre la tyrannie colonial. / Ogé et Chavannes, deux noms chers à la liberté, deux héros immortalisés par la défaite comme d’autres le sont par la Victoire, deux apôtres divinisés par le martyre. / Est-il une âme qui ne s’émeuve à leur souvenir, est-il une voix qui ne s’élève pour les glorifier! . . . Le champ de la révolution commence à leur échafaud. Nous nous inclinons respectueusement en passant devant ces tombs jumelles placées au seuil de notre histoire. / Honorons la mémoire des deux Spartiates modernes tout aussi vaillants, tout aussi malheureux que les antiques défenseurs du célèbre défilé de l’Œta!! . . ., 22–23. 38 In France, Ogé worked closely with Julien Raimond, a fellow Saint-Domingan, who published a volume (Raimond 1791) that sought to denounce and explain racial prejudice while simultaneously supporting slavery. Raimond’s intellectual position worked in concert with Ogé’s efforts. Raimond outlived Ogé, eventually sided with Louverture, and assisted in the composition of the latter’s 1801 Constitution. 39 For more on Ogé’s uprising, see Garrigus 2010. Among Ogé’s enduring legacies is his denouncement of the racial term mulatto. His letter on this topic is preserved in Beard 1863, 46–47. 40 On the debate about whether the Bois Caïman ceremony is pure legend, see Hoffman 1992, 267–301, who takes the extreme stance that the event may be purely mythical, Fick 1990, 260–66, Geggus 2002 and Dubois 2004b, 102, who believe that the event did take place, to admit that many key historical questions must be left unanswered. Within Haiti, oral Vodou traditions insist on the historical reality of Bois Caïman, as documented by Beauvoir-Dominique and Eddy 2000. 41 African, to be sure, but Caribbean distinctions can also be important. French 2021, 352–357, points out that several key figures leading up to Haitian liberation came from British colonies in the Caribbean. Mackandal, a maroon leader who led an unsuccessful uprising in the 1750’s, and Boukman, co-leader of the Bois Caïman ceremony, for example, came from Jamaica, which had experienced significant though ultimately unsuccessful slave uprisings, such as Tacky’s War in the 1760’s, and Henri Christophe was probably born in St Kitts. 42 Rémus ne put cacher à son ennemi l’horreur que celui-ci lui inspirait. Avec sa franche et indomptable nature, il était trop difficile au jeune fils de l’Africaine de se déguiser pour que ses sentiments demeurassent secrets. Ils se faisaient jour malgré lui. Une reconciliation n’était pas possible; le Colon le comprit et s’attacha perfidement à Romulus qu’il trouva plus accessible, 126. 43 In 1792 Louverture began working with Spain, but in 1794 he quit the Spanish and accepted a generalship in the French army. In 1795, Louverture and Rigaud worked in concert to repel a British invasion, and Spain gave control of Santo Domingo to France via the Treaty of Basel. In 1798 Britain tabled its ambitions to conquer Saint-Domingue, making Louverture, with his vision for racial equity in the colony, the most powerful person on the island. Rigaud, however, was the most powerful leader in the South and with those who preferred to see leadership of the colony in the hands of gens de couleur. Throughout these years, Louverture accumulated greater power in part by finding ways to send higher-ranking French officials (e.g., Laveaux, Sonthonax) back to France. Bergeaud presents Louverture’s work within the French system in terms of the Colonist’s power to manipulate Romulus. As we will see in the next chapter, Anténor Firmin would present the same situation in term of Louverture’s brilliance at hacking (i.e., mastering and outmaneuvering) the colonial bureaucracy. 44 In other contexts, Bergeaud thoroughly denounces colorism and execrates such distinctions as ‘diabolical inventions, based in the Machiavellianism of the colonists’ (84, inventions diaboliques accréditées par le machiavélisme des colons,’ 116). 45 This scene is perplexing and may have been intended by Bergeaud as something of a riddle. Kjærgård 2020, 192–194 presents the intriguing idea that this episode activates a debate between theories of classical natural right (derived from Aquinas’s analysis of

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49 50 51 52

53

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Aristotle) and individual natural rights as framed by Ockham. On this reading Remus/ Rigaud bows out of a conflict in which he could have triumphed, because he acts out of a recognition of the wider national benefit of declining to engage in (what is effectively) civil strife. Elle [i.e., l’histoire] abandonne le champ du mystêre au roman, tout aise d’avoir cette fois à raconter une action sérieuse liée au motif cache que voici . . ., 146. La mâle figure du géant, semblable à celle d’une statue d’albâtre . . ., 148. Note that this character is a true giant (géant), whereas the Colonist had earlier appeared to be such though in reality he was always just a man. Daut 2015, 445–447 convincingly connects Bergeaud’s ‘Spirit of the Nation’ with the 1822 painting ‘Le Serment des ancêstres’ by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière (1760–1832). This work features a very white God overseeing the union of Dessalines and Pétion. GuillonLethière was a Guadaloupean gens de couleur who spent his entire adult life in Europe. His neoclassical body of work is often in direct conversation with that of Jacques-Louis David. For an in-depth analysis of the conversation between ‘The Oath of Ancestors’ and David’s classicizing ‘The Oath of the Horatii’ (1784), see Grigsby 2001. The Roman legend of the oath sworn by the Horatii (three bothers of the Horatius family, mortal enemies of the Curiatius family) is preserved by Livy, The History of Rome 1.24–26. Snowden 2019, 111–139 devotes a chapter to the impact of yellow fever on the Haitian Revolution. Snowden, a historian, is the son of Frank Snowden, Jr., the classicist mentioned below. Preserved at Dubois 2004b, 191–192. For the rhetoric of indigeneity in Haiti, see Perry 2017. Daut 2015, 418, with original emphasis: ‘By narratively performing the forgiveness, forgetting, and fraternal love that brought Romulus and Rémus (or Dessalines and Pétion) back to one another . . . Bergeaud suggests that the origins of the nation could be marked by (“Racial”) reconciliation rather than (“racial”) division’. This is a key moment in what Daut fittingly describes as Bergeaud’s ‘new myth about “race” ’ (440). In the first history of the Haitian Revolution to be written by a Haitian, Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire d’Haiti (1804), Luis Félix Mathurin Boisrond-Tonnerre similarly describes Rochambeau’s theatrical dog show as ‘descend[ing] into the arena,’ as cited at Dubois 2004b, 292. Boisrond-Tonnere had been Dessalines’ secretary, and he composed the Haitian Declaration of Independence in conjunction with Dessalines. Or, pour éprouver sa mente, il transforma une cour en amphithéâtre avec des gardins, comme dans ces lieux où les Romains assistaient aux combats des gladiateurs et des bêtes féroces, 255. Roman beast shows could encounter a variety of setbacks, but the martyrdom of St. Euphemia in 303 CE offers an apt comparison here. She was wounded through torture before being placed in the arena to be devoured by lions. The lions, however, merely licked her wounds. For more on this story, see Castelli 2018. . . . les chiens . . . les traitent en véritables ennemis, 260. Curtis and Mucher, in Bergeaud 2015, xxvi. Bergeaud’s broadest sentiments are his opposition to oppression and his belief that racial tensions in Haiti were caused by French colonialism, and he is, therefore, equally quick to condemn Spanish genocide in the name of ‘true religion’ (177, original emphasis, la vrai foi, 310), Dessalines’ massacre of 1804 (180–82), or slavery in the U.S. (‘America should be ashamed!’, 183, Que l’Amérique rougisse!, 323). . . . un messager de Dieu, ange aux blanches ailes, au chaste regard, corps immaculé . . ., 38; La victoire reçut le baptême de l religion; elle était chrétienne, c’est-à-dire immortelle, 305. This is similar to the idea of paròl andaki, a Haitian form of conversation in which the speaker encodes a specific message for a specific in-group audience that is unrecognizable to anyone else listening. Frankétienne uses paròl andaki frequently throughout

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Dézafi (1975), the first novel to be composed in Haitian Creole, to convey an antiDuvalierist message. Frankétienne’s use of paròl andaki is discussed by Jonaissant in the ‘Afterword’ to Charles’s English translation of the novel (Frankétienne 2018, 172). Bergeaud explicitly prefigures Jean-Marie’s analysis in terms of the Haitian fulfillment of Enlightenment ideals. For example, Stella tells Romulus and Remus that ‘the cause to which you will dedicate yourselves is as much the cause of humanity as it is your own’ (121; La cause à laquelle vous allez vous dévouer est celle de l’humanité autant que la vôtre propre, 210). Kjærgård 2020 follows a similar methodology but to very different ends. Whereas I argue that the overt silencing of Vodou in combination with the presence of GrecoRoman religion permits a role for Vodou in Stella, Kjærgård reads the silencing of Bergeaud’s contemporary history of Haiti in 1850’s as an avenue for analyzing and critiquing the Soulouque era. Mackandal, Dutty Boukman, Cécile Fatiman (the name typically ascribed to the mambo who took a leading role at the Bois Caïman ceremony) are exceptions to this. For Louverture as a practitioner of Vodou, see Hazareesingh 2020, 161–163, Laguerre 1989, 65. Rigaud 1985, 12 in surveying the ethnic, geographical and ritual variations within the system of Vodou, notes that Louverture (spelled L’Ouverture) was descended from the Arada king Gaou-Guinou. The implication is not just that Louverture saw political advantages in interdicting Vodou, but also that he saw Vodou as a powerful political force in need of interdiction (regardless of whatever religious connotations he might have seen in it.) Kjærgård 2020, 204 makes a similar argument in his reading of Stella in terms of its engagements with Soulouque’s regime: ‘to praise Catholicism in this historical context [i.e., in the 1850’s] would seem to imply some measure of acceptance of the ‘Boyerist’ penal code and suggest an indirect critique of Soulouque’s religious policy’. The day after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, American televangelist Pat Robertson spoke about this tragedy in terms of a Satanic curse that originated with Boukman at Bois Caïman. For a broader account of such commentary, see Blaise 2014. Kjærgård 2020, who understands Catholicism as the ‘communal glue’ of Haitian national unity in Stella (206), would refute any such intentional side-door rhetoric on the part of Bergeaud. For the idea of ‘fuzzy connections,’ see Hardwick 2011. The later Haitian novelist Frédéric Marcelin describes Bergeaud’s use of the Roman names as bizarre (Autour de deux romans, 1903). Marcelin’s contemporary Fernand Hibbert crafted his own Roman double in Romulus (1908), which is discussed in Chapter  4 of this volume. Daut 2015, 420–422 describes other 20th century reactions to Stella. In a recent interview, Edwidge Danticat (the focus of Chapter 9) discussed how she first encountered Greek mythology in middle school. As she studied the Greek divinities, she said that ‘it struck me how some could be Haitian lwas’ (Clitandre 2021, 23). The Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz drew similar comparisons between the orishas of Santería (often called Regla de Ocha), with particular emphasis on parallels between the Ñáñigo rituals and ancient Mediterranean mystery cults in Ortiz 1950. Rivera-Barnes 2014 analyses the related cases of Cuba and Haiti, through the work of Ortiz and Jean Price-Mars (the latter of whom will be discussed in Chapter 5). Rivera-Barnes argues that both cultural critiques compared Caribbean religious practices to that of ancient Greece in order to foster a national identity that was palatable to elites with European tastes: ‘If the Greeks did not worship Satan, neither did the [Caribbean] slaves. Besides, it is not very difficult to understand why the slaves rejected the White man’s God: Worshipping this God amounted to spending a lifetime in chains’ (7). Vous avez quelquefois vu en songe un messager de Dieu, ange aux blanches ailes, au chaste regard, corps immaculé, vaporeux comme une ombre, éthéré comme le fluide transparent de l’espace, suave émanation de la bonté qui l’envoie et don’t il est à la

76  The ‘Lake of Lies’

70

71

72

73

74 75

76

fois l’interprète et l’image. Dites! Est-il un type humain qui vous rappelle cette celeste vision; oseriez-vous même la comparer, sans craindre de la profaner, à une beauté de la terre? . . . Eh bien! La jeunne fille arrachée aux flames était cet ange de votre rêve. Tout en elle avait une grâce, une perfection divine. Le pinceau du peintre et le ciseau du statuaire n’ont jamais donné la vie à quelque chose qui approchât de cette poésie incranée, 38. Une souveraine majesté brille sur son front et rehausse l’éclat de ses traits harmonieux et purs. Sa tête blonde au soleil rayonne comme dans un cadre d’or, 40; . . . elle représentait et personnifiait la Pallas antique, 62; sublime incarnation de la pensée divine, 135; comme la prêtesse de la Victoire, 303; Tous la suivirent d’un oeil humide, jusqu’au moment où elle se perdit dans l’espace, laissant après elle un long sillon d’or, 308. Marie, – la jeune mère, – était noire comme son fils ainé. Elle avait attaint cet âge où la beauté deviant sérieuse, sans rien perdre de ses charmes. Une figure mélancolique et douce, des yeux qui rappelaient ceux de la gazelle de son pays, une bouche garnie de perles brillantes, une peau délicate et fine, à laquelle l’action continue du coleil des champs avait donné comme le poli du marbre, formaient les traits distinctifs de cette tête africaine. Les vêtements grossiers de la jeune femme laissent deviner des forms analogues à sa physionomie gracieuse. Ses épaule nues avaient la pureté des modèles antiques, 8–9. Ancient Greek and Roman cultures cared less about modern distinctions between continents and adhered to norms found around the Mediterranean basin. As such, the northern coast of Africa was as much a part of the ‘classical world’ as were the southern European and western Asian coasts; both the darker skin tones of West Africa and the paler varieties of northern Europe would have appeared unusual by Mediterranean standards. For the issue of skin-color norms and discussions of dark-skinned beauty in ancient Greek and Roman contexts, see Haley 2009. E.g., Hartman 2008, Derbew 2019. In addition to such academic work, Robin Coste Lewis’s The Voyage of the Sable Venus and other poems (2015) offers a collection of poetic tributes to the legacy of the Sable Venus, and Kara Walker’s sculptural Fons Americanus (displayed at Tate’s Modern Turbine Hall in London from 2019–2020, at which time it was intentionally destroyed by the artist) is built around a figure whom Walker has described as the Sable Venus. The video to FKA twigs’ ‘Don’t Judge Me’ (2021) incorporates dancers moving around Walker’s Fons Americanus in Turbine Hall. On the relationship between this story of the Haitian flag and the more frequently adduced tale of Dessalines ripping away the central white portion of the French flag (as a symbol of ripping the whiteness out of Haiti), see Daut 2015, 439–440. Tout un passé vivait dans ce souvenir d’affection et de deuil. Ils avaient là, devant eux, leur mère et son supplice. Rattachant le present à ce passé maudit, et s’exaltant du ressentiment des nouveaux attentats que l’assassin de l’Africaine avait ajoutés à son ancient forfeit, ils saisirent avec avidité le vêtement teint de sang, pour donner suite au sinistre projet qui fit jadis entre eux le sujet de ce dialogue terrible: ‘Nous établirons un camp sur lequel flottera cet étendard. – Le crime en a fait don à notre désespoir. – Que le present du crime soit funeste au crime!’ / A l’extrémité d’un mât élevé . . . dressé au milieu du camp, ils attachèrent la robe de l’Africaine, sombre drapeau dont la brise déroulait les plis sanglants. / Plus tard, une autre couleur, empruntée à l’azur de notre ciel, fut placée à côté de celle qu’avait arborée la vengeance, soit pour en adoucir le sinistre reflet, soit pour rappeler la dualité de l’oeuvre de l’indépendance haïtienne, accomplice par le dévouement commun d’individus de deux nuances d’épidermes differentes, et que bénit la Providence en créant une société de plus sous les auspices de la liberté, 212–13. For an updated discussion of neoclassicism, including the prominent roles of Winkelmann and Lessing, see Fitzgerald 2022.

The ‘Lake of Lies’  77 77 This image appeared in Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854, 468). In terms of the themes of the present book, it is interesting to note, as Malamud 2019, 178–179 shows, that Nott was the rare example of a scholar who rejected the authority of Greek and Roman antiquity, especially the witness of Herodotus. The Apollo Belvedere, which fueled the Italian Renaissance when it was rediscovered in 1489, just three years before Columbus would land on Hispaniola, was hailed as the pinnacle of classical aesthetic perfection by the likes of Winkelmann. As such it is a veritable distillation of neoclassical ideals, though the statue began to fall out of favor in the Romantic era. More recently, this statue and others (such as the Hellenistic Greek ‘Laocoön and his sons’ and Michelangelo’s ‘David’) have been used by white supremacist groups as part of their propaganda campaigns, for which see Davis 2017.

3

On Haiti and Black Egypt Anténor Firmin’s De l’Égalité des Races Humaines (1885)

Πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος εστίν. ‘The human is the measure of all things.’

– Firmin quoting Protagoras, epigraph to De l’égalité des races humaines, Ch. 1

Homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto. ‘I am human; I think nothing human is absent from me.’ – Firmin quoting Terence, Lettres de Saint Thomas (1910, 257) Tous les hommes sont l’homme.

– Victor Hugo

In 1859, Bergeaud’s Stella presented the world with a vision of Haitian national brotherhood triumphing over divisive racial categories that, according to Bergeaud, were not naturally meaningful but were the direct result of colonial manipulation and the traumas of slavery. This optimistic vision came on the heels of one of the most blisteringly racist texts ever written: Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaine (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1883–1885) by the French aristocrat Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816–1882).1 This chapter demonstrates how Joseph Auguste Anténor Firmin (1850–1911) developed a two-part rebuttal to Gobineau’s text (and Eurocentric, scientific racism more generally) that spotlighted first, the importance of ancient Egypt, whose blackness Firmin proves in large part through reliance on ancient Greek witnesses, and second, Firmin’s own Haiti.2 His De l’égalité des races humaines: Anthropologie positive (1885) ‘offered the world its first sustained, philosophical, book-length response to scientific European racism’.3 In so doing, Firmin presents a unified, rather than a stratified, narrative of human achievement, a sentiment reflected in his epigraph to his opening chapter (and the first epigraph to this chapter). He quotes, in Greek and without translation, Protagoras’ dictum that ‘the human is the measure of all things’, a line unfortunately omitted completely from Charles’ English translation.4 DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-5

On Haiti and Black Egypt  79 After receiving his education in Haiti, with particular emphasis on classical and legal curricula, Firmin went on to teach Greek, Latin and French at the College de Saint Nicolas in Haiti starting in 1876.5 His facility with the language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome are on display throughout De l’égalité des races humaines, and a complete survey of his quotations, allusions and references is beyond the scope of this project. He became increasingly involved in Haitian politics and in 1883 was sent to France to work as a diplomat. It was there that Firmin was invited to join the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, which Paul Broca had started in 1859.6 Firmin followed Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855–1911) as the second Haitian member of this group, and Fluehr-Lobban suggests that the paradox of French anthropologists, virtually all of whom took white superiority as a scientific fact, admitting these two black, Haitian scholars can be explained in terms of ‘French liberalism or paternalism, or a certain pride the French took in the products of their own colonial mission in St. Domingue/Haiti’ (in Firmin 2000, xvii). Whatever the reason for his admission, Firmin found himself faced with ideas such as Broca’s polygenist theory that the various human races (e.g., the Ethiopian or Negro, Caucasian or white) were distinct and unequal species and Gobineau’s formulation of the monogenist superiority of the Aryan/white race. Gobineau’s overarching thesis holds that the story of the human species can be told in three stages, the Adamic period of human unity, the second stage in which the Biblical Fall caused the originally unified human race to fragment into three stable racial categories (white, yellow and black), and the final stage in which racial mixing was a chaotic and degenerative force.7 The clear ranking of white, yellow, black emerged in the second stage, and Gobineau found the purest example of contemporary whiteness, which had to be defended against racial mixing, in the Aryan population of Germany. The direct confrontation with Gobineau and his theories, that would later inspire German Nazism, spurred Firmin to compose his great anthropological treatise. Although some of Firmin’s ideas (with those of Broca, Gobineau and so many anthropologists of this era) have fallen out of favor, such as his endorsement of a Lamarckian notion that a culture’s educational attainment impacts its population’s craniometry, he approached the question of race with a deep commitment to logic and scientific rigor, and his key insight that race is more of a social than biological reality was an idea ahead of its time. Furthermore, his strong assertion of the Egyptian influence on ancient Greece prefigured the arguments of Cheikh Anta Diop and Martin Bernal.8 In one of his most sweeping articulations of this idea, Firmin claims that ‘The Greeks, who were, through the influence of Rome, Europe’s educators, must have taken from Egypt the most practical principles of their philosophy, just as they have taken from her all the sciences . . .’, adding that all ‘the masters of Hellenic thought, from Thales to Plato, habitually dipped their cups into the Egyptian springs and that they all journeyed to Sesostris’ homeland before setting out to propagate their doctrine’ (395).9 Relying on his careful analysis of the ancient evidence, Firmin was particularly opposed to arm-chair philosophizing about race, which he believed to be rooted more in flaccid retrojections from the modern successes of Europe than in any

80  On Haiti and Black Egypt scientifically sound conclusions. This dynamic is nowhere more evident than in his claim that Egyptology and anthropology had slouched into a mutually reinforcing circularity that led to the erroneous idea that ancient Egypt was a white civilization. In many ways, this idea represents the starting point of Firmin’s response to Gobineau, since the latter had argued that ‘all civilizations derive from the white race’ (1915, 210) and that ‘no negro race is seen as the initiator of civilization’ (212).10 Firmin sought to respond to this by demonstrating first that Egypt had been black, which dismantles the logic that Gobineau’s black race was incapable of cultural greatness, and second that the rise of Haiti (both as a nation through the Revolution and as a cultured society in the post-Revolutionary era) proved that a cultural renaissance was possible for people of any race. Finally, Firmin looks to the future by arguing that ‘Haiti must serve to the rehabilitation of Africa’ (lvi), a foundational point of his pan-Africanism.11 Ancient Egypt: The First Great and Black Civilization The modern field of Egyptology begins with Napoleon’s invasion of Ottoman Egypt and the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. Prior to this time, Egypt was widely understood among intellectuals as one of the earliest human civilizations, but Napoleonic reports of the wonders of Egypt, together with Jean François Champolion’s (1790–1832) efforts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820’s spurred a new wave of interest in ancient Egyptian culture. A major debate soon emerged (and has re-emerged periodically ever since) about the racial categorization and physical attributes of the ancient Egyptian people, and Firmin points to two early sources that argued for the normative darkness of the ancient Egyptians’ skin (228). In a posthumously published work, Champolion drew on artistic representations to link Egyptians not to the Copts of his era but with ancient Nubians (1836). This assertion that Egyptians were African and therefore dark-skinned was not a surprising claim at that time, and Champolion was following in the footsteps of Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney (1757–1820). On a trip through Egypt prior to Napoleon’s invasion, Volney had seen in the face of the Sphinx confirmation of Herodotus’ observation about the African traits of the Egyptians (1788, vol. 1, 79–81). But more recently the dark skin color of the ancient Egyptians had been called into question by anthropological studies, and Firmin points toward Samuel Morton (1799–1851) as ‘the first to transform into scientific doctrine the mistaken opinion that the ancient populations of Egypt had belonged to the White race’ (229).12 Morton, a physician and physical anthropologist from the U.S. who strongly promoted the idea of polygenism, published three volumes of craniometric studies, including Crania Aegyptiaca (1844), which argued that the ancient Egyptians were Caucasian and therefore had light rather than dark skin. It is the combination of Morton’s detailed craniometric work and Gobineau’s sweeping denial that the black race had ever had a hand in building a great civilization that Firmin seeks to undermine with his arguments about ancient Egypt. All experts agreed that ancient Egypt was a great civilization and that it predated

On Haiti and Black Egypt  81 the flourishing of ancient Greece, and so Firmin’s task was specifically to refute Morton’s thesis and thereby dismantle Gobineau’s. As he puts it, ‘the existence of [a great black civilization] would be enough to destroy the theory of the inequality of the races. One of the surest ways to refute such a theory would be to identify a period in history when the proud Europeans were absolute savages while Black people were holding up the flame of early civilization’ (226).13 To build his case, Firmin assembles evidence drawn from the visual arts, natural sciences, and comparative linguistics, but above all he relies on the witness of Greek and Roman literary sources.14 For example, he explains the many depictions of Egyptian women with lighter skin color in terms of a pattern of exogamy familiar from the Roman story of the kidnapping of the Sabine women, and he traces this social institution back to a pre-civilized era that he describes by quoting two lines of Lucretius in untranslated Latin (244).15 More generally, Firmin emphasizes the testimony of Homer, Herodotus, Diodorus of Sicily, ‘and a whole crowd of other Greeks’ as the surest evidence that ancient Egyptians were black (231–32).16 Against arguments based on craniometry or comparative linguistics, this crowd of Greeks had the triple advantage of being ancient themselves, offering eye-witness accounts (or nearly so) of ancient Egyptian culture, and affording an irreproachable cultural auctoritas in the eyes of most white scholars.17 For a Haitian author working in Paris, this argument had the added advantage of skewering European presumptions about classical heritage. Could a black Caribbean scholar really use Greek evidence against academics in Europe and the U.S. to prove the blackness of the Egyptian culture that gave rise to Greece? Firmin’s rhetorical strategy put his opponents in the position of either needing to accept Egyptian blackness or dismissing the Greek evidence and finding some more compelling line of argumentation.18 Although the majority of Firmin’s discussion of Haiti is left to other sections of his book, he occasionally connects his analysis of Egyptian material to his own country. For example, in a comment reminiscent of Volney’s experience gazing upon the face of the Sphinx, Firmin has this to say about the Memphite Colossus of Ramses II (231): ‘Everyone can see that the original beauty of this face . . . is a beauty which is closer to the Black type than to the White type. Every day in the Haitian countryside as well as in the cities, we meet Black specimens that are as handsome and often even more handsome.’19 As he works to counter the likes of Morton and Gobineau by using a phalanx of Greek sources to prove Egyptian blackness, Firmin is also setting the stage for connecting the two ends of his historical argument. The greatness of ancient Egypt is echoed in the rise of Haiti. Firmin concludes his discussion of the racial categorization of ancient Egypt with his most extended analysis of a Greek source, namely the myth of Epaphus as presented in the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound (246–52).20 He begins by praising the play as ‘the grandest and the most moving that the human genius has been able to conceive’ and as a piece of pre-Herodotean evidence that has been overlooked by Egyptologists and that shows ‘the Ethiopian origin of the people of the Pharaohs’ (246).21 The play depicts the Titan Prometheus chained to a rock for his crime of bringing fire to humans. In his torment he is visited by a variety of characters,

82  On Haiti and Black Egypt most of whom are divine but including one human, a young woman named Io, who is Firmin’s primary concern. Her backstory is that Zeus had fallen in love with her and, because of this, Zeus’ jealous wife Hera had devised a slate of harassments for Io. Before encountering Prometheus, Io had been driven out of her home in Argos (on the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece), turned into a cow (partially or wholly), and chased by a divine gadfly. She is a pitiable figure, but Prometheus knows that far more is in store for her. He foretells that she will wander far and wide, eventually coming into the land of ‘the dark tribe’ (kelainon phylon, 808) by the Aithops river (809) and, following the course of the Nile, to the Delta and the Mediterranean coast. There, Zeus will restore Io to her human form by ‘touching’ her (epaphôn, 849), and in this way she will become pregnant with and there give birth to ‘dark Epaphus’ (kelainos Epaphos, 851). Although Io is usually described as being from Argos, Firmin portrays her as being ‘from Ethiopia’ (247),22 perhaps following a similar comment found in Augustine of Hippo’s City of God (18.3), written in the early 5th century C.E. But even if Io is rarely understood as a native of Egypt or Ethiopia, her importance in this situation has less to do with her place of origin than with her journey and her son. Firmin uses Prometheus’ prophecy, and especially the final stage of movement from the land of the Aithops River and toward the mouth of the Nile as a symbol of the origins of Egyptian society. ‘In Io’s long flight Aeschylus wanted most of all to represent the exodus of the Egyptian people who, according to Greek tradition, had journeyed from the farthest regions of equatorial Africa to the mouth of the Nile where they lay the first foundations of ancient civilization’ (247–48).23 This establishment of Egyptian origins leads to the further development of the civilized world through Epaphus, who is destined to become the patriarch of royal lines in both Egypt and Greek Thebes. Epaphus serves as a human parallel to the divine culture-hero Prometheus: ‘As the poet saw it, Black Epaphus, the personification of the Egyptian people, was the bearer of civilization who would bring the light to every branch of humanity’ (248).24 One problem with Firmin’s argument is that Aeschylus clearly portrays Io as growing up in the Greek city of Argos, which might suggest that Egyptian civilization actually came from Greece through her. But the temporal framework of Prometheus Bound is deeply murky, since its entire premise is that the Titan has just started his punishment for the crime of giving fire to humanity. The play makes clear that Prometheus is the benefactor of human progress (especially in the ‘Catalogue of the Arts’, 447–506), but his punishment seems to take place just as humans are beginning to emerge from an almost bestial stage. If this is true, how has the city of Argos already been built? Aeschylus does not suggest that Argos is the first city, and his play accepts the conflation of various temporal perspectives. Although Firmin does not address these issues, he does suggest that Io is constructed primarily as an African mythical figure. He notes that Io means violet, ‘a dark color which is very close to black’, that the related word iolos means black, that Io has been understood by others as a manifestation of the Egyptian god Isis, and perhaps most intriguingly, that iolos may be related to Iolof, a name for the Hausa people, ‘the darkest and most handsome people of Africa’ (248).25

On Haiti and Black Egypt  83 For Firmin, Epaphus serves as a critical point in his overarching argument about ancient Egypt. Prometheus Bound confirms that Ephaphus had dark skin, and his many descendants include both figures like Libya, Aegyptus and Europa, who give their names to Mediterranean regions, and Cadmus, the founder of Greek Thebes. Firmin also briefly turns to Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, a play dealing with the fall-out from a quarrel between two of Ephaphus’ great-grandsons, Danaus and Aegyptus. These two brothers had come into typical mythical conflict, and Danaus, with his fifty daughters, fled from Egypt to Argos in Greece. There, the fifty sons of Aegyptus were to marry the daughters of Danaus, but the brides agreed to murder their husbands on their collective wedding night. Only one decided to spare her new husband, and this pair, Lynceus and Hypermestra, became the new king and queen of Argos. Firmin quotes one couplet from the play (719–20) to confirm that the skin of the Egyptian sailors was dark (melangkhimos).26 Firmin sees such Greek literary evidence as ‘overwhelming and invaluable’ (248) proof that ancient Egyptians were black and that they came originally from Ethiopia.27 As such, there is no way that they could be white or Caucasian or have originated anywhere outside of Africa. With this point established and Gobineau’s claim of black inferiority thereby undermined, he begins to move toward the modern situation. Before focusing on Haiti, however, he turns to Darwinian evolution, still a new and developing concept in this era, in order to show how racial traits change over time, and Firmin’s primary test cases are Egypt and Greece. Cultural Variability as Witnessed in Greece Firmin starts this line of reasoning by condemning the fields of anthropology and Egyptology for failing to coordinate their efforts more effectively, particularly in the naïve assumption that the nineteenth century inhabitants of Egypt, whom Firmin describes as white fellahs, were racially identical to ancient Egyptians. A similar error, according to Firmin, is to be found in the analysis of Broca’s craniometry. In a move that seems surprising by contemporary standards, Firmin actually accepts the importance of Broca’s measurements, which show that ancient Egyptians had a larger cephalic index than contemporary ‘Negros’. What Broca has failed to understand, according to Firmin, is the appropriate interpretive lens for assessing this data, namely a blending Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary theories: ‘Indeed, if we accept as a fact that education and civilization have a direct ameliorating influence on the organic constitution of the human races, would we not find it surprising and incomprehensible if the intelligent and civilized Blacks of ancient Egypt had a cranial configuration absolutely similar to that of the uneducated Blacks of contemporary Africa?’ (287–88).28 He makes the general theoretical point a few lines later: ‘while there are influences which trigger a progressive selection, there are also others which bring about regressive selection, both material and moral. Instead of an evolution, what occurs is a painful revolution; instead of progress, there is regression’ (288–89).29 This is followed by an explanation of such regression in terms of the detrimental influence of the mixing of populations (289): ‘Invasion by less advanced peoples and by a foreign race impeded then destroyed Egyptian

84  On Haiti and Black Egypt civilization by blocking the rise of the Ethiopian world toward a more advanced level of civilization’.30 If this last point sounds like something that could have come from Gobineau’s pen because of its emphasis on the deleterious effects of mixing populations, Firmin distinguishes his thinking in two ways. First, the fate of the ancient Egyptians was not the fault of racial mixing (as Gobineau might have it) but, rather, the mixing of groups with different levels of cultural attainment. And second, this process of regression is not unique to any race but is, rather, a universal human reality, and the proof of this is to be found in the contrast between ancient and modern Greece, the latter so recently liberated from Ottoman control (289): Fallen into complete decadence, the grandchildren of Pericles, the descendants of the race that had produced Homer and Aeschylus, Phidias and Praxiteles, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, underwent such deep degradation that a turn-of-the-century observer without philosophical insight would have reason to wonder whether there remained in them any generous impulse, any aspiration to rebirth.31 Although Firmin elsewhere expresses optimism that the modern Greek nation may, given time, live up to the greatness of this slate of classical Greek luminaries, he continues in this negative vein as he builds toward another statement of the flexibility of racial attainment: ‘The grandchildren of the ancient Athenians are upbraided and treated with contempt by the grandnephews of the ancient Celts. Quod non fecere Barbari, fecere Groeculi’ (290).32 The cultured Romans saw the Celts as barbarous, but nineteenth-century France had taken the mantle of Roman power. Progression and regression can happen anywhere, and Firmin stamps this point with a flourish via his adaptation of the quip about the Barbarini family of Pope Urban VIII: quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barbarini, ‘what the barbarians won’t do, the Barbarini will’. Firmin’s rephrasing, borrowed from Reinach, fits his theme: ‘What the barbarians won’t do, the Greeklings will’. Having already shown that Egyptian greatness was attributable to the black race, Firmin here argues that Greek greatness had nothing to do with its racial whiteness. Rather, all great cultural achievements are ‘flowers of the human mind which bloom only where civilization allows the tree of science’ (290–91).33 With this point, Firmin encapsulates one of his most important themes. The history of human greatness has never hinged on matters of race (as the likes of Gobineau, Broca and Morton would have it); what does matter is the confluence of social forces that can facilitate or impede the flourishing of any human community. Egypt and Greece were both great in the past but have, by Firmin’s standards, fallen mightily, whereas France has attained great heights from the humble beginnings of Celtic Gaul. And this idea of cultural variability allows Firmin to pivot to his positive argument about contemporary black achievement: ‘To illustrate this phenomenon, we need only look at the evolution of the Black people taken in Africa and brought as slaves to the Americas’ (292).34

On Haiti and Black Egypt  85 Haiti, The Heir to Black Egypt For most of the next hundred pages, Firmin demonstrates the emerging greatness of leading Haitian intellectuals. Many of his examples come from literary fields, but he is eager to show that law and science, areas to which Firmin devoted a great deal of his own efforts, were also on the rise. As always, he has frequent recourse to antiquity to bolster his points. For example, in praising the brief but spectacular career of Ducas Hippolyte, he quotes Horace Odes 1.24.9 with citation but without translation (298 = 441): multis ille bonis flebilis occidit, ‘he died amid the tears of many good people’. Or to show that slavery had never been visited exclusively upon the black race, Firmin writes (335): ‘The Helots, scorned and mistreated by the Laconians [i.e. Spartans], were they not members of the White race? All the categories of slaves, kept under foot by the Roman citizenry, were they not of Caucasian origin?’35 Or again, in a section on morality, he highlights the contrast between the greatest achievements of ancient Greece and that culture’s casual acceptance of various forms of prostitution (345 = 508). But the main point of these pages is about the possibility of progress and regression. Just as Egypt and Greece have fallen far below their ancient level of cultural attainment, so too has Haiti begun to show a rebirth of black greatness, witnessed in no small part, of course, by Firmin himself. Only after outlining the intellectual achievements of independent Haiti does Firmin turn to the Revolutionary era. Early in this section, he connects the transformation of the ancient Roman military with what happened in Haiti (365): ‘We need not recall here the magnificent spectacle of a mass of slaves bent under the most odious oppression who are suddenly transformed into a formidable army of tireless, invincible soldiers who, like Pompey’s legions, would march from victory to victory.’36 This passage makes an important point, but it requires some explanation in order for that point to become obvious. In the early Roman Republic, the army was made up exclusively of land-owning citizens, whose agricultural holdings provided enough wealth that they could afford to go on seasonal campaigns. As Roman power expanded geographically, especially through the Punic Wars fought in North Africa against Carthage from 264 to 146 BCE, the need grew for large forces that could be kept away from Italy for longer periods of time. And so, in 107 Gaius Marius (c. 157–86 BCE) instituted military reforms that would have sweeping consequences. Marius was a novus homo, literally a ‘new man’ or someone who had broken into the highest senatorial class without a storied family legacy, and he had an amazing career as both a general and a politician, serving as consul (the highest Roman office) a record seven times. In 107 BCE he was trying to bring about a final victory in the Jugurthine War against Numidia (112–106). Seeing that landowning recruits were increasingly scarce, while Rome was awash with underemployed poor citizens (the capite censi), Marius waved the property requirement for military service. He quickly recruited a large army, won the war, and inaugurated a new era in which the military was increasingly devoted to successful generals, who

86  On Haiti and Black Egypt could pay soldiers in war booty, rather than to the Roman Senate. This new chapter in Roman military history fueled the rise of Pompey, the first general whose clout could directly challenge the power of the Senate, and then to Julius Caesar, who effectively broke the power of the Senate and transformed the Roman Republic into an Empire.37 For Firmin, then, the evocation of Pompey leading his low-status (though certainly not enslaved) troops offers an important parallel to Haiti in that the early Revolutionary period saw the rise of a new kind of soldier. The former slaves of Saint-Domingue, like the newly recruited landless Roman soldiers, were drawn from the lowest ranks of society, and both armies marched under the leadership of a general (Louverture, Pompey) who would challenge but not yet overthrow a great power. As Firmin draws the Roman and Haitian examples together he claims that ‘Never before had the world seen such beautiful elan among the downtrodden’ (365).38 Firmin next focuses on the exploits of François Capoix (also known as Capois or Capois-la-Mort, d. 1806), one of the heroes of the Battle of Vertières (1803). Firmin likens Capoix to the French ‘demi-god’ (demi-dieux) generals fighting in Europe (Hoche, Marceau and Moreau) and calls him ‘the Black hero’ (noir héros) before quoting a long passage by Victor Schoelcher (1804–1893), a French abolitionist who had visited Haiti (366–67 = 541–42).39 Capoix’s exploits were truly impressive, as he led the assault against the well-fortified French troops ensconced on a hill. After three attacks were rebuffed, Capoix rallied his forces for a fourth effort. A  cannonball killed his horse, a subsequent gunshot knocked off his hat, but Capoix soldiered on. Rochambeau, leading the French forces after the death of Leclerc in 1802, was so impressed that he called a halt to the fighting to salute Capoix’s bravery. On the following day, Rochambeau sent Capoix a new horse, hailing him as ‘the Negro Achilles’ (l’Achille nègre, 367 = 542). No greater martial compliment could be adduced from Greek mythology, and Firmin effectively presents this story via a chorus of voices, since he is quoting Schoelcher quoting Rochambeau. Through this concatenation of speakers, Firmin allows a prominent French civic leader (Schoelcher was still alive at the publication of Firmin’s book) to quote a French general (hated by Haitians for his sadism) to serve as the voice of black greatness via this Homeric comparison. Firmin follows a similar pattern as he turns to the main leaders of the Revolution, though presumably because his focus is on black greatness he makes no mention of the mixed-race leaders Pétion and Boyer.40 In a rhetorical tricolon that moves in reverse chronological order, he briefly praises Christophe, especially for his construction of the Palais Sans-Souci, devotes more space to Dessalines, defending the massacre of 1804 on the grounds that ‘he simply retaliated against the atrocious crimes of his adversaries’ (368), and then leads into a much longer section about the man ‘who offers the tangible proof of the innate superiority of the Black race’ (369), Louverture.41 His extended discussion of Louverture (369–77= 545–60) includes several long quotations from Wendell Phillips’ speech ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’, delivered in both New York and Boston in December  1861. Phillips (1811–1884), like Schoelcher, was a committed abolitionist, who also worked

On Haiti and Black Egypt  87 for women’s rights and in support of Native American voting rights and Lakota (Sioux) land claims. Firmin’s invocation of these abolitionist voices from the U.S. and France bolsters and broadens his claims about the Haitian achievement, and like Schoelcher’s-Rochambeau’s comparison of Capoix to Achilles, Phillips draws heavily on the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Firmin cites Phillips on Louverture’s preference for the works of Epictetus, Raynal, military memoires, and Plutarch (369 = 546). This list of books may well be historically accurate, but the various elements also serve a rather obvious symbolic purpose. Collectively they show Louverture to be a highly educated reader, and individually they demonstrate his character. Epictetus (1st-2nd c. CE), the Stoic philosopher who was born a slave, offers a fitting personal model in terms of their shared transcendence of slavery and the idea of philosophy as a lifestyle emphasizing endurance and self-discipline. Raynal is regularly cited as the nearly prophetic voice whose abolitionist writings predicted the rise of a leader such a Louverture. Military memoires, most probably including works such as Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars and The Civil War and Xenophon’s Anabasis, establish Louverture’s military credentials. And Plutarch was the author of the Life of Crassus, the best-known source of information about Spartacus, the figure to whom Louverture was compared by 1796, if not earlier. Firmin’s citation of Phillips’ account of Louverture’s library casts him as a philosopher-general and, as so often, as the ‘Black Spartacus’. As Firmin traces Louverture’s career, he briefly discusses the War of the South (1799–1800) in a manner that both responds to Bergeaud’s treatment of the same episode and fits with his own larger objectives. In Chapter  2, I  discussed Bergeaud’s presentation of this conflict between the forces of Louverture and Rigaud through Stella’s symbolic narrative about Romulus and Remus. In Bergeaud’s novel, Romulus (Louverture) is seduced into making war on his brother through the malicious influence of the Colonist, and Remus (Rigaud) chooses not to respond forcefully, after he receives a divine visitation from the Spirit of the Nation. Thus, Louverture appears the more gullible and Rigaud the more noble combatant. Firmin shifts the responsibility for the War of the South but also emphasizes French colonial influence (371): ‘The duplicitous Hédouville inspired Rigaud to rise against Toussaint Louverture, leading a fatal rebellion, really a senseless war, which would be responsible for much bloodshed and the death of thousands of brothers.’42 The language of brotherhood, combined with Firmin’s comment, perhaps responding directly to Bergeaud’s generic affiliation, that he is ‘not writing history here’ suggests that this passage is Firmin’s direct response to Bergeaud’s novelistic version of this story.43 Not only does Firmin claim that it was Rigaud, not Louverture, who was manipulated by the French, but he goes on to say that in terms of French scheming ‘the Haitian leader [i.e., Louverture] managed to neutralize [the French representatives]. Better still, this Black man of genius used them to the benefit of his cause’ (371).44 In contrast to Bergeaud’s presentation, therefore, Firmin positions Louverture as outmaneuvering both Rigaud and various French administrators in a manner that conforms to Firmin’s emphasis on Haiti as the cradle of a renewed black civilization. Firmin affirms the notion of a Haitian national

88  On Haiti and Black Egypt brotherhood, but whereas Bergeaud imagines such a brotherhood to be post-racial and indifferent to skin color, Firmin envisions a specifically black brotherhood more in line with the terms of the 1805 constitution, which had legally defined all Haitians as black. Returning to Phillips, Firmin quotes a long passage comparing Louverture favorably to Cromwell, emphasizing that Louverture and his troops had to rise up from an initial position of social and educational degradation that was far more extreme than in the case of the English general. The passage concludes with an acknowledgment that Haiti is a small nation, ‘but it was large as that of Attica, which with Athens for a capital, has filled the earth with its fame for two thousand years. We measure genius by quality, not by quantity’ (374).45 For Phillips, classical Greece was the benchmark of cultural attainment, and his comparison between Haiti and Attica fits perfectly within Firmin’s theoretical framework of cultural (not racial) variability. Whereas Schoelcher’s Rochambeau had framed the comparison between Capoix and Achilles in terms of race, noting that the former was a black (nègre) Achilles, as if that racialized adjective meaningfully impacted the comparison, Firmin here allows Phillips to make a comparison without any racial implications: Athens was a pinnacle of human achievement, and so too is Louverture’s Haiti. This message sounds forth again, in more rousing terms, as Firmin quotes the final lines of Phillips’ speech (375–76): You think me a fanatic tonight, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion of the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday [thunders of applause], then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE [Long-continued applause].46 To be sure, Phillips is working from deep within a Eurocentric intellectual tradition, and his conclusion hardly aspires to a global perspective, but inasmuch as he is taking aim directly at whiteness as the racialized mainstream of that tradition, he situates Louverture not as a black Phocion, but as a subject who, without recourse to racial categorizations, surpasses the leading figures of European imperial history drawn from Greece, Rome, England, France and the U.S. Absence of Colorism in Ancient Greece and Rome The final section of Firmin’s tome that deals extensively with ancient Greece and Rome also offers a fitting conclusion to this chapter. In a few pages that roughly prefigure the arguments of Frank Snowden, Jr.’s Before Color Prejudice (1983), Firmin examines a variety of texts to argue that the ancient Greeks and Romans, for all their cultural elitism, did not discriminate on the basis of racialized skin color

On Haiti and Black Egypt  89 (418–22).47 He begins by noting how much emphasis the Greeks put on bodily aesthetics and their obsessive concern for physical training, proper attire and public comportment. He offers Socrates, whom he describes as ‘not exactly handsome’ (418), as an example of someone whose natural lack of physical beauty did not stop him from being concerned with aesthetic matters.48 All this sets the Greeks up as a people who might predictably express prejudice in terms of skin tones. And yet, Firmin claims, they did not. He supports his point with a rapid tour through classical literature and examples drawn from Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil and Ovid.49 Firmin pauses over Ovid’s presentation of the Cretan princess Ariadne, whose story clinches his argument against ancient colorism, and the complexity of the issues involved in this example warrants extended and detailed consideration both in terms of Ovid’s words and Firmin’s analysis of them. Ariadne enters the mythological scene when the Athenian hero Theseus comes to Crete to be given as a sacrificial victim to the half-human Minotaur. Against the wishes of her father, King Minos, she helps the young man escape the monster’s Labyrinth, and the two flee together. But Theseus, for reasons explained variously, abandons Ariadne, who then becomes the wife of the god Bacchus (or Dionysus). Firmin picks up just after Bacchus has returned to Ariadne from an adventure in India, bringing another royal woman as a prize. Ariadne laments that she has once again been rejected and says, in a line that Firmin quotes in Latin without translation, ut puto, praeposito est fuscae mihi candida paelex (Ovid, Fasti 3.493, 421–22). Hearing her complaints, Bacchus proves himself to be dedicated to Ariadne and takes her up into the heavens to be his immortal beloved. In discussing this story, Firmin refers three times to Ariadne’s dark or black skin and once to the white complexion of the Indian princess. Thus, he clearly understands Ovid’s words to mean something like ‘I suppose that a light-skinned (candida) lover is preferred to dark (fusca) me’.50 When Bacchus assures Ariadne of his love, Firmin concludes from this vignette that for Ovid ‘black skin is in no way a sign of inferiority’ (421).51 Such a conclusion seems to ignore the possibility that Ariadne’s anxiety, seemingly rooted in the different skin-tones of the two women, actually shows that color prejudice did exist and that Bacchus’ devotion is unexpected in light of that prejudice. Nevertheless, Firmin’s interpretation of the Latin can be supported. Other scholars have assessed this scene quite differently, however, and the contrasting analyses bring Firmin’s ideas about the ancient Mediterranean into sharper relief. The most common handling of Ariadne’s words begins from the assumption, rooted in other Greek and Latin sources, that Indians had very dark skin and that Ariadne, like many other idealized mythical women, had a light complexion. Heyworth, in his recent commentary on Book 3 of Ovid’s Fasti exemplifies this trend. He prints the line that Firmin quotes as a question, and indicates in his notes that the query must be ‘sarcastic’, since ‘Ariadne is in fact fair’.52 To bolster this point he cites Ovid’s own description of her in another context as having hair that is croceus, ‘saffron colored’ (The Art of Love, 1.530).53 For Heyworth, then, the line that Firmin quotes suggests something more like this, understood with dripping sarcasm: ‘Am I so dark that a fairer lover has taken my place?!’

90  On Haiti and Black Egypt The next lines of the poem are difficult to construe, but they can support Heyworth’s reading (493–96): At, puto, praeposita est fuscae mihi candida paelex? eueniat nostris hostibus ille color. Quid tamen hoc refert? Uitio tibi gratior ipso est. Quid facis? Amplexus inquinat illa tuos. Well, I suppose, that a fair lover has replaced dark me? Let that color be for my enemies! But what’s the use? She is more pleasing to you [i.e., Bacchus] for that very fault. What are you doing? She stains your embraces. For Heyworth and contrary to Firmin’s assessment, these lines show that Ariadne has lighter skin than the Indian princess, that Ariadne wishes dark skin upon all her enemies, that Bacchus has a (perhaps surprising) attraction to this other woman specifically because she is not light-skinned, that Ariadne considers dark skin to be a ‘shortcoming’ or ‘blemish’ (uitium), and that the very touch of this dark-skinned woman could ‘stain’ (or, less literally, simply ‘ruin’ or ‘besmirch’) Bacchus’ embracing arms. All this is possible, and Heyworth’s interpretation could match what Ovid intended, but Firmin’s position has its merits as well, especially in light of other arguments he makes throughout his text. Most importantly in this context, it is possible to understand Ariadne’s comment about skin color without sarcasm and as an expression of Ariadne’s real concern that Bacchus may prefer the candida Indian princess to fusca her. Snowden lists this Ovidian example as a case of fuscus referring to ‘non-Negro’ individuals who either have the ‘brown or blackish skin of non-European peoples’ or ‘members of the white race whose skin, for any reason, becomes brown or darkish’ (1947, 274).54 He does not address the Indian princess at all, but by taking Ariadne’s self-presentation seriously, he implies that a candida Indian princess is not a contradiction in terms. Some years later, Bruère followed Snowden’s lead and explained Ovid’s use of fusca as an acceptable reference ‘to dark-complexioned persons rather than to Negroes’ (1956, 113). More recently, Goldman, in a monograph dedicated to social and cultural implications of Roman color-words, accepts that Ariadne is worried about a ‘fairskinned’ (2013,124) rival, while also shifting to the possibility that Ovid’s words may have more to do with hair color than skin color. Shelley Haley has discussed the Roman vocabulary of skin color through the methodological lens of critical race theory, and her conclusions further support Firmin’s position. Her formulation starts from the idea that Romans understood their normative skin-tone to be albus, which she translates not as ‘white’ but as ‘pale brown’. From this starting point, fuscus represents a darker brown, which can – but need not – imply an African connection.55 All this suggests that it is quite possible, despite the comparanda adduced by the likes of Heyworth, to imagine a Cretan woman with skin that was fuscus.

On Haiti and Black Egypt  91 For Firmin, the idea of a fusca Ariadne may well have seemed intuitively obvious. Although he does not discuss Crete in any detail, the whole thrust of his analysis of the ancient Mediterranean traced a movement of culture and human agents of that culture from black Egypt to classical Greece. Given the interactions he discusses, including myths of intermarriage, it would have been logical to assume that some Cretans, given their proximity to Egypt, would have been fuscus. Firmin was writing prior to Arthur Evans’ excavations of Knossos, which started in 1900 and yielded a significant number of connections between Bronze Age Crete and Egypt.56 Objects such as the ‘Captain of the Blacks’ fresco from Knossos, which depicts one fully preserved male runner with reddish-brown skin and the far darker legs of two more runners, surely would have made Firmin all the more convinced that Ariadne’s description of herself as fusca was an appropriate, natural, and nonsarcastic label. Much as Firmin might have readily understood Ariadne to be fusca because of his arguments about the blackness of ancient Egypt, so too might the idea of a candida Indian woman have made sense within his world view. As mentioned above, Greek and Roman sources typically presented Indians as having dark skin. Herodotus offers an orientalizing version of this when he compares the skin of Indians to that of the Aithiopians and adds that Indians have sex in public and that the men of both racialized groups have black, rather than white, semen (Histories 3.101).57 Later authors, such as Pliny the Elder (1st c. CE, Natural History, 6.70) and Arrian (1st-2nd c. CE, Indica, 6.9), describe a range of skin tones among Indians, with more northerly people having lighter skin.58 But even these more nuanced accounts insist that Indians had skin so dark that the color associations of the word candidus would seem an improbable fit. Despite this, two points (one relevant to Ovid’s era; the other to Firmin’s) can be adduced to make sense of a candida Indian princess from Firmin’s perspective. First, words that we often associate strongly with color hues regularly conveyed information relating to luster, saturation or even movement beyond what most modern readers expect.59 The best evidence for this comes from the Homeric epics. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the sea is regularly described as ‘wine-faced’ (oinops) and so too, in one instance, are cattle (Odyssey 13.32), though we would associate neither with the deep-red or reddish-purple of wine. Athena magically transforms Odysseus’ shabby appearance and gives him the positive attributes of ‘black skin’ (μελαγχροιὴς, 16.175) and ‘blue’ hair (κυάνεαι, 16.176). At another point, his hair is ‘like the hyacinth flower’ (ὑακινθίνῳ ἄνθει ὁμοίας, 6.231), which should, in terms of the hue, imply some form of dark blue.60 Similarly, Zeus seems to nod assent with his ‘blue brows’ (κυανέῃσιν ἐπ᾽ ὀφρύσι, Iliad 1.528), and Hector has ‘blue’ hair (κυάνεαι, 22.402). With good reason, translators never render these blueish words literally, opting typically for alternatives like ‘dark’ or ‘tanned’. But the point remains that words that I would confidently translate as ‘blue’ if they were applied to a flower or the sky were meaningful for men’s hair in a way that does not parallel modern English usage. This slipperiness of Homeric color words is at the heart of an article by Tim Whitmarsh about race and color in which he argues that Achilles’ hair, described

92  On Haiti and Black Egypt as xanthos at the moment that Athena grabs his locks and pulls him back from killing Agamemnon, should be understood at least as much in terms of its associations with swift and glancing motion as with the associated hues, which encompass yellow, golden, blond(e), auburn and ruddy.61 Such implications that transcend or de-emphasize hue may also help explain why Odysseus, with his ‘blue’ hair in the example above, has xanthos hair in two other scenarios (13.399 and 431). It should be noted that in none of the Homeric examples of ‘blue’ hair is the figure in question behaving in quick-moving or dynamic ways. Odysseus is receiving Athena’s magical favor, Zeus is nodding solemnly, and the corpse of Hector is being dragged (but not befouled) behind Achilles’ chariot. It may well be that descriptions of hair as xanthos suggest volitional dynamism whereas ‘blue’ hair is appropriate to other, more staid, narrative contexts. To be sure, Homeric color words cannot directly explain Ovid’s contrast between fuscus and candidus, but Haley’s study of Latin color words, mentioned above, finds similar issues in the Roman era. She argues that the Latin vocabulary of color often conveys information about luster. Thus, ‘albus and ater connote a matte-like quality, whereas candidus and niger imply luster and brightness’ (2009, 33). She then examines a graffito that, as in the line of Ovid cited by Firmin, contrasts the appearances of two women. In this case, Haley translates candida as a ‘bright brown woman’ and nigra as a ‘bright black woman’ (ibid). She does not discuss the sheen implied by the word fuscus, but her schema suggests an interpretation of Ariadne’s lament in this way: ‘As I see it, a bright brown woman has been preferred to brown (and not particularly bright) me.’ We might even remove color associations altogether for a colloquial translation: ‘He prefers her brightness to plain old me!’ Firmin makes it clear that he understands color as fundamental to this Ovidian line, but Haley’s theories and the valences of Greek and Latin color words stretching back to Homer, make it possible that Ovid, and perhaps also Firmin, understood candida to convey information about the Indian woman’s shining or lustrous appearance in addition to the hue of her skin. I suspect, however, that another issue loomed large in Firmin’s understanding of candida as ‘white’ in this passage, namely the nineteenth-century theories about the origins of racialized whiteness.62 In 1795, when Saint-Domingue was in the midst of its revolutionary period, the German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) introduced the term ‘Caucasian’ as a label for the white race and located early Caucasians in a territory that included India. Although in the 1775 and 1776 editions of his De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind) Blumenbach did not stress the importance of skin color, the revised 1795 edition does. In that volume, he begins his description of each of his five races with a simple label based on skin-color, and for each group he maps an original geographical range. At this later stage of his career, Blumenbach described Caucasians as white (colore albo) and located them not only in Europe (where the Sámi, whom he calls Lapps, are excluded from the Caucasian label), but also in North Africa and Asia as far east as the Ganges.63 His influence on theories of race and human development was enormous, especially as physical anthropology worked in concert with historical linguistics to frame ideas about Indo-European

On Haiti and Black Egypt  93 (or Indo-Aryan) peoples and languages. Most relevant to the case of Firmin, Gobineau located the white race originally in Siberia, from which they traced one primary migration route into India and eventually to Europe. For Firmin, whose De l’égalite des races humaines reacts most directly to Gobineau, the dominant theories about race in his era would have made it eminently reasonable to understand Ovid’s candida Indian princess not as a ‘bright brown woman’ in Haley’s formulation or even as a generally ‘fair’ woman but, rather, as a white, Caucasian woman in accord with the ideas of Blumenbach, Gobineau and others. Firmin knew and frequently discussed Blumenbach’s theories, and he devotes an entire chapter to racialized debates involving India. He occasionally delights in revealing that light-skinned Indians cannot have been the creators of the great ancient Indian civilizations: ‘There is a great irony indeed in all that talk of the superiority of the White Aryan race, when in reality the White Aryans were considered of such little worth .  .  . Why is it that, on the shores of the Seine and the Thames, they put on a pedestal everything that is scorned along the Ganges?’ (263).64 Firmin is working against but also from within the anthropological and historical linguistic theorizations of European whiteness as an extension of Aryan India. In light of this, his explanation of Ovid’s story about Ariadne makes perfect sense. The Indian princess was candida, ‘light skinned’, and Bacchus preferred his fusca, ‘dark-skinned’, Cretan lover. On this reading, Ovid becomes for Firmin a corrective lesson against the likes of Blumenbach and Gobineau. The ancient Cretan population was intermediate (in terms of geographical location, skin tone and the movement of culture) between black Egypt and classical Greece, the cultural foundation of post-classical, white Europe. Meanwhile ancient India did have light-skinned people, but they were not superior to other peoples because of their skin tone. Panning out from this extended analysis of Firmin’s brief but important comments about Ariadne, he argues that if the Greeks and Romans were free of any racialized color prejudice, then the racial oppression driving both colonial imperialism and nineteenth-century anthropological theories is neither natural nor necessary nor even in line with the values of ancient Greece and Rome, which were so valorized by later Europeans. Conclusion Firmin frames De l’égalité des races humaines as a long, complex and direct rebuttal to Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. His comparative and cross-disciplinary analysis rejects both the polygenist disunity of the human species and any hierarchical ranking of racial categorizations. To prove his point, Firmin interweaves historical evidence to argue for parallel examples of black cultural greatness in ancient Egypt and nineteenth-century Haiti. His argument about the racial identity of the ancient Egyptians placed him squarely within the fiercest Egyptological and anthropological debates of his day, but his valorization of his homeland presented a unique argument that transcended debates about slavery or the Haitian Revolution and offered a more wholistic vision of the Haitian national achievement less than a century after independence.65

94  On Haiti and Black Egypt To argue his case in front of his colleagues in the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris as well as his wider Francophone audience, Firmin turns again and again to the cultural authority of ancient Greece and Rome as the heirs to Pharaonic Egypt that had produced a familiar, extensive and broadly-endorsed literary and artistic record. By insisting that ancient Egypt was fundamentally black, he also creates a direct connection with Haiti that is neither geographical nor historical but, rather, predicated on a shared cultural-racial achievement (much in the same vein that Boyer’s letter, analyzed in Chapter 1, had made a similar rhetorical move). This point would become the bedrock of pan-Africanist thinking as Firmin moved beyond his response to Gobineau and became one of the architects, together with Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams and his fellow Haitian Bénito Sylvain, of the first Pan-African Congress in London in 1900, which was attended by other classically trained black activists and scholars, such as Anna Julia Cooper (whose PhD dissertation examined the role of slavery in Saint-Domingue in the French Revolution) and W. E. B. du Bois (whose father Alfred had been born in Haiti).66 Firmin’s vision readily embraces the idea that the great heroes of the Haitian Revolution were cut from the mold of classical antiquity, but he refuses to stop with comparisons between Capoix and Achilles or Louverture and Phocion. Instead, he blends Wendell Phillips’ vision of Haiti as a new Athens with his own historical conclusion that Haiti is well on its way to becoming the new Egypt. In his brief dedication ‘To Haiti’ that opens his monumental anti-racist work, Firmin asserts the fundamental optimism he sees in the variability of the human story: ‘In dedicating this book to Haiti, I bear them all in mind, both the downtrodden of today and the giants of tomorrow’ (li).67 Notes 1 Gobineau is a major figure in nineteenth-century discussions of race, but arguments in this era were building upon a well-established pattern. Gates and Curran 2022 present a disturbing glimpse of this earlier era, with a collection of essays that responded to a 1739 contest, sponsored by the Bordeaux Royal Academy of Sciences, to explain the origins of racialized blackness and black inferiority. 2 Daut 2015, 432–435 surveys Gobineau’s discussion of Haiti as a primary example of theories about the problems of racial mixing. 3 Russell 2014, 45. Firmin’s magnum opus includes far more than I  will discuss here, particularly in terms of his engagement with contemporary debates within the field of anthropology, such as mono- vs polygenism. 4 As displayed in the epigraph to this chapter, Firmin prints the Protagorean dictum thus: πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἄνθρωπος ἐστίν, though the idea is preserved with slight variation by Plato (Theatetus 152a) and Sextus Empiricus (Against the Mathematicians, 7.60). 5 Price-Mars 1978, 56. For information about Firmin’s life, the best sources are Jean Price-Mars 1978 biography and Joseph 2021, supplemented by Fluehr-Lobban xl-xlii (in Firmin 2000), Bernasconi 2008, Hoffmann 1997–1998, and Benjamin 1960. 6 Fluehr-Lobban’s introduction to Firmin 2000 notes several other works by black authors from this era that sought to oppose the dominant view of a hierarchical racial ranking (xiii). These include two pieces by Haitian scholars: Louis-Joseph Janvier’s ‘L’Égalité des Races’ (1884), which Firmin mentions (107–08, 316–17), and Hannibal Price’s De la Réhabilitation de la Race Noire par la République d’Haiti (1900); from the U.S.

On Haiti and Black Egypt  95

7 8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17

18 19

Martin Delany’s Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color (1879). Williams 2014 offers a deeper dive into anti-racist writing that preceded Firmin. Mezilas 2021 presents an important overview of the discourse of race in the Caribbean in Firmin’s era and beyond. Note that Gobineau’s use of the color yellow as a racial category is used as a designation of Asian peoples, whereas yellow has often been used in Haiti to describe mixed-race Haitians. The best analyses of Firmin’s role in Egyptological debates are Joseph 2014 (which includes comments on Bernal, 137–38) and Delices 2021, both of which discuss Diop in detail. Although few classicists have engaged at all with Diop’s work (most relevant is Diop 1954), Bernal’s caused an uproar. For recent re-assessments of Bernal’s role within Classics and with extensive bibliography, see Rankine 2011 and McCoskey 2012, 167– 84. For a full discussion of the precursors to Bernal’s claims (often called ‘the vindicationists’), see Berlinerbrau 1999, 133–46, and St. Clair Drake 1987, 1990. Les Grecs qui ont été les éducateurs de toute l’Europe, par l’intermédiaire de l’influence romaine, ont dû prendre de l’Égypte les principes les plus pratiques de leur philosophie, comme ils en ont pris toutes les sciences . . .; . . . les maîtres de la pensée hellénique, ont, depuis Thalès jusqu’à Platon plongé continuellement leurs coupes aux sources égyptiennes, ayant tous voyagé dans la patrie de Sésostris avant de commencer le propagation de leur doctrine’, 584. Citations of Firmin’s work come from Firmin 2000 (English) and 1885 (French). Sesostris, it should be noted, is best attested by the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories 2.102–110), who describes this Pharaoh marching north into Scythia and Thrace and founding Colchis (the homeland of Medea, in modern Gerogia) as an Egyptian colony. This Sesostris, as presented by Herodotus, seems not to have existed, though the description seems to draw on the reigns of Senusret I and III. For this identification, see Lloyd 2007, 313. Translation according to Gobineau 1915. Haïti doit servir à la rehabilitation de l’Afrique, xiii. On Firmin’s Pan-Africanism, see Williams 2021; Jenkins 2021b. . . . le premier à ériger en doctrine scientifique l’opinion erronée qui rapporte à la race blanche les anciennes populations de l’Égypte, 339. L’existence d’un tel fait, quelle que soit l’époque de sa manifestation, ne suffirait-elle pas pour renverser entièrement la théorie de l’inégalité des races? Ne serait-ce pas une refutation des plus accablantes, si l’on pouvait montrer une période historique où les fiers Européens étaient absolument sauvages, tandisque des hommes de sang noir tenaient le flambeau de la civilization naissante?, 334. Firmin’s linguistic work would be taken much further in Diop 1954. Firmin grounds his understanding of language in Greek philosophical theories of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus (121). De Rerum Natura, 5.955–56: sed nemora atque cavos montis silvasque colebant / et frutices inter condebant squalida membra, ‘but they lived in the groves and mountain caves and woods and among the bushes they hid their dirty limbs’. These lines come from a longer passage about primitive humans. une foule d’autres Grecs, 342. More recent Greek scholarship has questioned whether Herodotus actually went to Egypt, and Homer is now regularly understood as the figurehead of an oral tradition of story-telling, but in Firmin’s era, it was regularly accepted that these were all real individuals who had visited Egypt. On Herodotus’ alleged voyage to Egypt, see, for example, Armayor 1978. For the status of Homer, see Nagy 1998. A similar argument is made by Rath 2021, who discusses Firmin’s work as an ‘ “intrusion” from within the European intellectual communities of the nineteenth century’ (54). Chacun peut voir que cette beauté originale . . . es tune beauté qui se rapproche plutôt du type noir, que du blanc. En Haïti dans nos mornes comme nos villes, on rencontre journellement des types noirs aussi beaux et souvent plus beaux, 341.

96  On Haiti and Black Egypt 20 Modern scholarship is divided about the authorship of this play, but in Firmin’s era Aeschylus was universally thought to be the author. Ruffell 2012, 13–19 offers a succinct and balanced discussion of this debate. 21 . . . le plus grandiose, le plus émouvant que le genie humain ait jamais pu concevoir . . . l’origine éthiopique du people des Phaons, 366. 22 Io, comme le Nil, sort des confins de l’Ethiopie . . . , 367. 23 Eschyle aura voulu surtout, dans cette lonue course d’Io, décrire l’exode du people égyptien que la tradition hellénique fait généralement sortir du fond de l’Afrique équatoriale, pour atteindre les bouches du Nil où il devait jeter les premières assises de la civilization antique, 368. Firmin’s point here makes clear sense within the nineteenthcentury habits of scholarship, though many scholars today would disagree that this or any other such Greek myth preserves historically reliable information about the origin of Egyptian society. Hall 1992, responding to Bernal’s Black Athena, offers a typical criticism of the reliance on mythical narratives for historical realities. 24 Le noir Epaphus personnifiant le people Egyptien est, dans la conception du poète, le canal par lequel la civilization devait pénétrer dans toutes les branches de l’humanité, 368–89. 25 .  .  . couleur sombre si approchante du noir .  .  . les plus noirs et les plus beaux de l’Afrique, 369. The Greek word ion means violet, and the darkness of the flower and the color easily slide toward blackness. Iolos, however, is not a Greek word, except as a proper name. ὀλός, which could perhaps be misread as ιολος or iolos (Firmin prints the word in Greek but without accent or breathing mark) is squid ink and the lexicographer Hesychius of Alexandria (5th c. CE) glosses the rare word iôlon (ἴωλον) as melan, which means ‘black’. 26 For an updated discussion of race in Suppliant Women, see Derbew 2023; Kennedy 2023. 27 . . . arguments nombreux et d’une valeur incontestable, 370. 28 En effet, si l’on ne conteste plus que l’éducation et la civilization aient une influence directe sur la constitution organique des races humaines qu’elles améliorent et perfectionnent, ne serait-il pas étonnant et incompréhensible que les Noirs de l’ancienne Égypte, intelligents et civilisés, eussent une conformation absolument semblable aux Noirs encore incultes de l’Afrique contemporaine?, 427. 29 . . . à côté des influences qui entraînent une selection progressive, il y en a d’autres qui mènent à des transformations régressives, tant au point de vue matériel qu’au point de vu moral. Alors, au lieu d’une évolution, il s’accomplit une revolution pénible; au lieu de marcher en avant, on retrograde, 429. 30 L’invasion des peuples moins avancés et d’une race étrangère ont enrayé et renversé la civilisation égyptienne, en contrariant l’essort du monde éthiopien ne un état de perfectidonnement définitif, 429. 31 Tombés dans une complète décadence, les petits-fils de Périclès, les descendants de la race qui a produit Homère et Eschyle, Phidias et Praxitèle, Protagoras, Socrate, Platon et Aristote, ont subi une dégénération si profonde, qu’un appréciateur peu philosophe pourrait bien se demander, vers le commencement de ce siècle, s’il restait en eux aucun sentiment généreux, aucune aspiration au relèvement, 430. 32 Les petits-fils des anciens Athéniens sont gourmandés par les arrière-neveux des anciens Celtes et en sont traités avec mépris. ‘Quod non fecere Barbari, fecere Groeculi’, 431. For this phrase, Firmin references Reinach 1883, 140. 33 . . . la fleur de l’esprit humain qui ne s’épanouit que là où la civilization a fait pousser l’arbre de science . . ., 432. 34 Pour constater la réalité du phénomène que j’indique, on n’a qu’à jeter un coup d’oeil sur l’évolution qu’ont accomplie les hommes de la race noire tirés de l’Afrique et transportés comme esclaves dans les deux Amériques, 435. On Firmin’s idea of culturalracial progress, see Russell 2014. 35 Les Hilotes si maltraités et si méprisés par les Lacédémoniens n’étaient-ils pas de race blanche? Toutes les catégories d’esclaves qui servaient de marchepied au citoyen

On Haiti and Black Egypt  97

36

37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49

romain, n’étaient-ils pas de la race caucasique?, 492. The Helots were the lowest social group in ancient Sparta (Laconia), and they can be understood as a people enslaved to the collective population of Spartan citizens. In the case of Roman slavery, Firmin is not correct, since Roman slaves could be taken from virtually anywhere within the reach of Roman power regardless of skin color. Aussi est-il inutile de remémorer ces scènes magnifiques, imposantes, où d’une masse d’esclaves courbés sous la plus odieuse oppression sortit, comme les legions de Pompée, une armée compacte et solide, composée d’hommes infatigables, de lutteurs invincibles, toujours prêts à voler à la victoire!, 540. For more on Marius’ reforms, see Matthew 2010. For the process whereby Roman generals increasingly challenged the power of the Senate, see Hawkins 2017, 137–140. Jamais dans une foule ainsi humiliée on n’avait trouvé d’aussi beaux élans, 540. Schoelcher 1843, 141. Despite his rhetorical emphasis here, Firmin did not consider black people to be superior to those of mixed ancestry. He spends an entire chapter refuting racist arguments about the inferiority of mixed-race people and championing a uniquely New World vigor in Caribbean métissage (203–24). He would return to this theme late in life in Lettres de Saint Thomas (1910), which addressed pan-Caribbeanism directly and aimed ‘to persuade his fellow Haitians to transcend exclusionary notions of identity and boldly enter a modernizing global space’ (Dash 2006, 13). For more on Firmin’s pan-Caribbeanism, see Dash 2004. . . . les crimes atroces commis par ses adversaires et qui transformaient les siens en simples représailles, 544; pour avoir fourni la prevue la plus éloquente, la plus évidente de la supériorité native de la race noire, 545. Firmin included a full-page image of Louverture immediately before his dedication page, in effect dedicating his work to the project begun by the hero of the Revolution. Firmin’s engagement with Louverture is studied by Miller 2021. . . . [Rigaud] se laissa tromper par la duplicité d’Hédouville et ouvrit contre ToussaintLouverture une rebellion fatale, qui fit couler le sang de milliers de frères, dans un guerre insensée, 549. Nous ne faisons pas ici de l’histoire, 548. .  .  . ils furent complètement annulés. Au lieu de les ils furent obliges de servir d’instruments aux desseins de ce Noir sur le front de qui brillait la vraie aureole du genie!, 550. Mais il était aussi étendu que l’Attique qui, avec Athènes pour capitale, remplit la terre de sa renommée pendant deux mille ans. Mesurons le génie non par la quantité mais par la qualité, 554–55. Vous me prendrez sans doute ce soire pour un fanatique, dit-il, parce que vous lisez l’histoire moins avec vos yeux qu’avec préjugés; mais dans ciquante ans, lorsque la vérité se fera entendre, la Muse de l’histoire choisira Phocion pour les Grecs, Brutus pour les Romains, Hampden pour l’Angleterre, Lafayette pour la France, elle prendra Washington comme la fleur la plus éclatante et la plus pure de notre civilization naissante et John Brown, comme le fruit parfait de notre maturité (Tonnerre d’applaudissements); et alors, plongeant sa plume dans les rayons du soleil, elle écrira sur le ciel clair et blue, au dessus d’eux tous, le nom du soldat, du l’homme d’État, du martyr TOUSSAINTLOUVERTURE! (Applaudissements longtemps prolongés), 557. Williams 2014, 10 similarly connects the spirit of Firmin’s work to Snowden’s book. . . . qui ne fut pas absolument beau, 622. Elsewhere, Firmin discusses examples of famously ugly Greek figures, such as Thersites, Aesop and Socrates. For this trio of uglies, see Hawkins 2016. A great deal of work has been done on conceptualizations of race in the ancient Mediterranean since Snowden’s era. Most important in this regard are St. Clair Drake 1987, 1990, Isaac 2004, McCoskey 2012, McCoskey 2021, Derbew 2022, and (with an emphasis on the role of archaeology) Greenberg and Hamilakis 2022.

98  On Haiti and Black Egypt 50 Candida and fusca are the feminine forms of candidus and fuscus. I use the former when referring to the women described by Ovid and the latter when discussing the terms more generally. The masculine form is, by convention, used as the lexical entry. 51 . . . la couleur noire ne constitue aucune infériorité . . ., 627. 52 Heyworth 2019, 181. For this line, Heyworth’s text follows that of the standard scholarly edition of Fasti, namely the 1978 Teubner edition edited by Alton, Wormell and Courtney. Heyworth’s interpretation can be found much earlier, as in Taylor (1882, 117) who notes that the line is ‘of course ironical’, but also raises the possibility that fusca and candida could here imply an opposition between plain and pretty rather than an issue of skin pigmentation. This last idea would remove any colorism from Ariadne’s lament and suggest something like ‘has a prettier lover displaced plain me?’, while embedding that colorism deep within the aesthetic vocabulary such that lighter skin tones imply beauty. 53 Heyworth also points to Catullus’ description of Ariadne as having flavus or ‘golden’ hair (Poems 64.63) and Hesiod, who contrasts Dionysus’ golden hair (he is chrysokomês) with Ariadne’s which is xanthê, a word that can mean anything from golden to lightbrown to auburn (Theogony, 947). 54 He does not specify whether he considers Ariadne to be a member of a dark-skinned but ‘non-Negro’ race or a ‘white’ woman whose skin has become dark. 55 Haley 2009, 31–32. In the pseudo-Virgilian Moretum, an African woman named Scybale is described as fusca colore (1.33). 56 This connection between Crete and Egypt is already prominent in Evans 1895, prior to the start of his excavations at Knossos. This trend continues throughout the publications charting his findings at Knossos published from 1921 to 1936. Martino 2012 offers an example of how the relationship between Minoan Crete and Egypt is analyzed in more recent times and with updated archaeological methods and tools. 57 Samuels 2015 comments extensively on this passage and the role of blackness in Herodotus’ writing. 58 For discussion, see Parker 2008, 93–94. 59 For an updated and broad survey of color theory, see Fine 2022, especially 7–34. 60 For this passage, see Irwin 1990. 61 Whitmarsh 2018 engages the public controversy over the casting of David Gyasi, who has very dark skin, to play Achilles in the BBC television series Troy: Fall of a City, which first aired in 2018. 62 The best and most comprehensive study of whiteness remains Painter 2010. 63 Blumenbach, 1795, 289–290. In the subsequent pages, he describes the Mongolian race as gilvus (pale yellow), the Aethiopian as fuscus (dark or black), the [Native] American as cuprinus (copper), and the Malayan as badius (brown). 64 Vraiment, n’est-ce pas une dérision que de tant parler de la superexcellence de la race blanche aryenne, quand en réalité les balncs aryens valent si peu . . . Pourquoi élève-t-on si haut sur les bords de la Seine et de la Tamise ce qu’on regarde si bas dans les parages du Gange?, 388. 65 Charles 2014 studies the importance of Firmin’s thinking about Haiti among the community of nations. 66 On the role of Firmin’s text in the pan-Africanist movement, see note 11. 67 . . . en le dédiant à Haïti, c’est encore à eux tous que je l’adresse, les déshérités du present et les géants de l’avenir, vi.

Historical Segue 2

From 19th c. Nationalism to 20th c. Populism How should a new country bring itself into existence? What must be rejected in order to break from the past and create a distinct identity? And what pre-existing cultural building blocks should be retained or re-used in new ways? What stories prove useful or problematic in developing the social and institutional structures to carry forward the project of nation building? The previous three chapters have explored texts that address such questions from a variety of perspectives throughout the first century of Haiti’s existence. In some ways, the pairing of these works highlights the innovative range of literary forms and contrasting articulations of Haitian identity that were being framed in this era. Yet despite their different approaches and emphases, Boyer, Bergeaud and Firmin cluster around a core set of values. Most obviously, they all contribute to the radically liberationist image of their new country that had defeated the forces of colonial greed, imperial subjugation and racialized tyranny. In an era of revolutions, no newly founded country had to overcome such towering obstacles or underwent such a fundamental transformation as did Haiti. The authors of these texts also share a habit of framing the Haitian narrative in terms of material drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity. To be sure, this is not an exhaustive list, and the Haitian project could be framed in ways that did not look to Greco-Roman antiquity, but these selections provide a representative spread of those authors who did. The question then arises: why did these authors reach for this ancient material and how we can understand their decision to do so? The simplest response is that these men were all educated in the Francophone classical tradition, and their trained mode of expression emerged from their study of Homer and Virgil, Livy and Herodotus. To some extent this is surely correct, but it is not sufficient, because this literary habit, even if it is the result of years of training, has consequences that must be evaluated. A second explanation for these efforts to craft images of Haiti in dialogue with ancient Greece and Rome involves the practical realities of asserting a role for the new nation on the international stage, which was dominated by European powers. Boyer, Bergeaud and Firmin all understand their texts to be directed largely, though certainly not exclusively, toward audiences beyond Haiti. Boyer is conducting international diplomacy and negotiating relationships by recognizing the fledgling Greek state and opposing the imperial reach of both France and the Ottoman DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-6

100  From 19th c. Nationalism to 20th c. Populism Empire, and it is possible that the translation of his letter into Greek by Filemon was intended for wider dissemination among Greek audiences. Bergeaud’s endorsement of the Novel over History is overtly couched as an effort to bring the story of the Revolution to new audiences who are not ready for or interested in the tedium of detailed historical analysis, and his novel was published in Paris. And Firmin, who dedicates his anti-racist anthropology to Haiti, builds his text in direct dialogue with those members of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris who were trying to cement theories of white supremacy into the factual record of human history. In such rhetorical circumstances, the canonical familiarity, aesthetic idealization and assumed cultural auctoritas of ancient Greece and Rome were the coin of the realm for Francophone Europeans. Haitian writers who engaged in this literary mode of citation, allusion and the creative hacking of classical forms could more easily be included in wider intellectual and literary discourses. But if recourse to classical material was both familiar and expedient for these authors, a final question arises: is this form of literary expression a capitulation to European values of whiteness and a betrayal of the Caribbean, African and black identity of Haiti? Bergeaud’s choice to frame the Revolution as an outgrowth of Ogé’s rebellion without mentioning Bois Caïman, for example, can be read as a valorization of mixed-race leadership over that of black figures, such as Louverture, Dessalines and Christophe, which, in turn, might lead to the conclusion that his macronarrative about Romulus and Remus represents a Eurocentric literary agenda. More than this, the very idea of the translatio studii or what Appiah (2016) calls the ‘golden nugget’ image, through which the supposed grandeur of ancient Greece passed directly and exclusively to Rome and then to France and other European centers, can be understood as the aesthetic and academic register of European whiteness. From this perspective the efforts of Boyer, Bergeaud and Firmin might be understood as a kind of assimilation and an accommodation of that hegemonic epistemology. If, however, we see the ‘golden nugget’ not as a fact of history but, like other glistening prizes such as the ‘golden apple’ or the ‘golden fleece’, as a powerful but pliable myth, then we can see in these authors’ works not a capitulation but, rather, a hacking of classical forms that opens them to new audiences and agendas. Boyer, Bergeaud and Firmin do not merely insist that Haitians have the right to participate in this classicizing discourse but that the totality of Haitian experience – from the Middle Passage to the Revolution to nation-building, from the endless varieties of Caribbean hybridity to national unity, from the violent rejection of white supremacy to articulations of an identity outside that oppressive ideological structure – has the right and the ability to change the story of the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome. Boyer uses the language of citizenship to encourage Korais and his companions to join Haiti as the heirs to the ancient Greek ideal of defending freedom against imperial oppression, whether that threat be from ancient Persia, the Ottoman Empire or even France, which saw itself as the rightful heir to the ‘golden nugget’. In so doing, Boyer builds upon the language of the Haitian Declaration of Independence that adopts the Greek discourse of barbarism to argue that the barbarous Other

From 19th c. Nationalism to 20th c. Populism  101 is not to be recognized by skin color (or any other racial trait) but by a politics of domination and colonial extractive greed. If Boyer suggests that Haiti has claimed the mantle of ancient Greece (a mantle that is not exclusive but that can be shared with the emergent Greek nation), then Bergeaud imagines a foundational Haitian narrative that surpasses that of Rome. Once again, Romulus and Remus have come together to form a new polity, but Stella charts a course upon which the fratricidal crime embedded in Rome’s mythical and physical foundation is avoided. The power of the canon insists that any telling of this Roman myth must include the climactic moment of brotherly violence (just as Oedipus must commit patricide and incest, Troy must fall, and Aeneas must get to Italy), but Bergeaud’s novel rejects such conformist thinking and offers a re-writing of the classical canon to show what can happen if Romulus chooses not to kill Remus. And Firmin delves into the deeper past to create the most daring deformation of classical ideals. Haiti is not the new Greece or the new Rome (though he finds elements of both) but a renewed Egypt. He presents a prequel to the concept of translatio studii by arguing from a panoply of disciplinary perspectives that ancient Greece received its lifeblood from black Egypt and that through a process of cultural progress governed by Darwinian and Lamarckian theories and not by the racist laws of physical anthropology articulated by Broca and Gobineau, Haiti was emerging as the second undeniably great black civilization. Firmin’s ideas generate two implications that transition into the next section of this volume, in which Haitian authors between the turn of the century and the rise of Duvalierism look to ancient Greece and Rome in very different ways. First, by arguing so forcefully for the blackness of ancient Egypt and for the critical role that Egypt had in shaping classical Greece, Firmin puts the colonialist empires of Europe in an awkward position in terms of race and the classical tradition. If race exists as a physiological reality and shapes history in meaningful ways, as most nineteenthcentury anthropologists would have it, then European powers were racial interlopers in the story of civilization that had begun in Pharaonic Egypt, and the rise of Haiti was rebalancing the ledgers. But if, as Firmin was so ahead of his time in articulating, race was a social construct that had no significant basis in human biology, then Europe and Haiti had equal claims to the legacy of the ancient Mediterranean worlds. Second, by arguing for a connection between Haiti and Egypt that rested not on the biology of race (since that does not exist) but on the social experience of blackness and a shared cultural history that can be traced back to Ethiopia, Firmin set the stage for destabilizing the elitist tendencies of the nineteenth century. (Bergeaud’s preference for the highly educated Ogé over Bois Caïman is just one example that may be explained more in terms of such elitism than in terms of race – though obviously these categories are interrelated.) By setting out an early vision of PanAfricanism, which would lead toward the birth of the négritude movement, Firmin paves the way for a black solidarity that globalizes Bergeaud’s vision of a brotherhood rooted in Haitian nationalism and an opposition to colonial oppression. Whereas these nineteenth-century Haitian authors forged connections between the great men of antiquity and modern Haiti (Dessalines as Romulus, Louverture as

102  From 19th c. Nationalism to 20th c. Populism Leonidas or Phocion, Capoix as Achilles), twentieth-century authors begin to explore the idea that the Haitian people, not just their most famous leaders, could be connected in useful and meaningful ways with the populations of ancient Mediterranean cultures. The next three chapters take inspiration from Firmin’s epigraph, which dedicates his De l’égalité des races humaines to the people of Haiti, to trace a distinctively twentieth-century approach to hacking classical forms. This new trend engages two revolutionary histories, both of which are, in some ways, outgrowths of the Haitian Revolution. One is an intellectual history already nascent in Firmin’s writing that leads to various forms of black populism that emphasizes the value, integrity, and importance of the cultural realities of all social strata in Haiti (not just the elites) and Haiti’s African and Caribbean (not just its European) heritage. This movement was always internationalist, as can be seen from the slate of speakers at the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, where men and women from the Caribbean, the U.S., Africa, and Europe came together for discussions and collaborations related to matters of racial uplift and anti-colonial action. Speakers included such luminaries as Henry Sylvester Williams, the Trinidadian co-organizer of the conference, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the British composer, Anna Julia Cooper, the classically trained educator and feminist from the U.S. whose doctoral thesis from the Sorbonne dealt with French slavery in Saint-Domingue, and W. E. B. du Bois, the American classicist and sociologist. Also in attendance were Firmin himself, preparing to stand for the Haitian presidency in 1902, and Benito Sylvain, the Haitian lawyer and co-organizer who was then working as the aid-de-camp to Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia. This intellectual trend, which would come to include the négritude movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and calls for formal decolonization across Africa, included a central role for both Haiti (where Césaire famously said that négritude ‘stood up for the first time, Césaire 2013, 18–19) and Haitian intellectuals, such as ethnologist Jean Price-Mars and poet/playwright Félix Morisseau-Leroy, both of whom feature in the following chapters.1 Within Haiti this new focus on the social realities of the majority can be sensed most readily in issues connected to language and religion. The valorization or denigration of Haitian Creole and Vodou serves as a barometer for populist ideals across the first half of the twentieth century. The former is the only language spoken by the vast majority of Haitians throughout its history, and the latter fuses West African and Catholic spiritual and theological elements into a distinctively Haitian religion. Attention paid to Creole and Vodou, largely absent from nineteenthcentury Haitian literature, necessitates an acknowledgment of Haiti’s uniquely Caribbean identity and its historical connections with Africa. Paired with this intellectual trend, in which the Haitian Revolution and Firmin’s work loom so large, is the revolutionary political history of Haiti in this period. Various power blocks sought to consolidate or replay the Haitian Revolution in order to solidify the nation’s position domestically and internationally – from the Liberal Insurrection of 1883 (the subject of Fernand Hibbert 1908 novel Romulus, which is discussed in Chapter 4) to Firmin’s 1902 presidential bid that briefly brought Haiti to the brink of civil war to the U.S. Occupation of Haiti from 1915 to

From 19th c. Nationalism to 20th c. Populism  103 1934. The latter period of foreign military control gutted Haiti for a generation, as the first independent nation in the Americas occupied the second under the guise of fostering democracy and economic development. The cumulative impact of these militant political spasms was that Haiti rarely enjoyed prolonged stretches of prosperous stability in this era. These two trends, the intellectual movement toward uplifting the Haitian majority and the political upheavals that sought to replay or finalize the Revolutionary triumph of 1804, come together in the presidential victory of a young doctor and public health expert in 1957. Before becoming the brutal dictator, who would tyrannize the country with his personal militia known as the Tonton Macoute (‘Uncle Gunnysack’, a childsnatching bogeyman of Haitian lore) and drive countless Haitians out of the country (where they would build a robust diasporic culture discussed in Chapters 7–9), François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier (1907–1971) was a black nationalist intellectual. He opposed the political domination of the Francophone, typically mixed-race, elite, and he embraced Vodou as the religion of the people. He sought to fulfill Firmin’s vision of shaping Haiti into a great black nation. He was a Pan-Africanist inspired by the work of Price-Mars, and in 1938 he co-founded Les Griots, a magazine devoted to studying and highlighting the African roots of Haitian culture. It is a sad irony of history, that the oppressiveness of the two Duvalier regimes (1957–1986) emerged from the same progressive trends discussed here.2 The three chapters ahead treat texts from this era that increasingly focus on the Haitian majority. Hibbert’s Romulus (1908) is one of a handful of novels from the first decade of the century that begin to engage Creole and Vodou, and it also presents a new version of the myth of Romulus (now without Remus) that innovates not only on ancient Roman versions but also on Bergeaud’s handling of this myth in Stella (Chapter 2). This new Romulus blends these issues into Hibbert’s satirical account of the Liberal Insurrection that took place in his hometown of Miragoâne when he was a child. Whereas Hibbert presents a caricature of everyday urban life in Haiti that incorporates a few bits of Creole and Vodou realities, Price-Mars issues a manifesto in Ainsi Parla l’Oncle (So Spoke the Uncle, 1928), in which he calls out the Francophone elite for their disdain for the realities of rural life outside the urban centers. He calls for his audience to set aside their fixation on all things French and to recognize the important and vital contributions of Africa that have, through Caribbean hybridization, shaped Haitian identities. In crafting this message, Price-Mars presents an innovative twist on the valorization of ancient Greek and Roman cultures in which he essentially turns such aesthetic idealism inside-out. Instead of vaunting the greatness of ancient Mediterranean cultural achievements (and perhaps following Firmin in suggesting that Haitian luminaries were living up to such ancient benchmarks), Price-Mars focuses on the quotidian realities of the Haitian countryside and argues that this hybrid culture, which emerged from adapting indigenous, African and European inputs, was every bit as dynamic, fascinating and worthy of respect as were the peasant communities of ancient Greece and Rome. And finally, in the aftermath of the U.S. occupation and on the cusp of Duvalier’s ascendancy, Morisseau-Leroy composed the work that originally drew me into this project, his adaptation of the Greek myth of Antigone. Composed in

104  From 19th c. Nationalism to 20th c. Populism Creole so that it could be understood by the Haitian majority, saturated with Vodou rituals so that the superhuman forces at work would feel familiar to that majority, and presented outdoors to mass audience across Haiti so that it could be accessible to as many people as possible, Antigòn represents a sustained example of hacking classical forms in Haitian literature.3 His thorough integration of the Sophoclean narrative with Creole language and Vodou spirituality represents a triumph in the long history of the Haitian Revolution, contributing to Firmin’s vision of a nation that did not just win a series of military confrontations but also developed a unique cultural identity. Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn represents both a critical moment in the emergence of Creole literature and a harbinger of things to come, since many have noted the ways in which his Kreyon (Creon) seems to have anticipated the figure of Papa Doc Duvalier. The play opens a new era of Creole literature, fostered by Morisseau-Leroy, Franck Fouché, Frankétienne and others, but it also creates a link to the topic of Chapter 7, namely the literature of the Haitian diaspora, since it was not long after the debut of Antigòn and the rise of Duvalier, that MorisseauLeroy fled Haiti and composed the rest of his corpus (including his Wa Kreyon (King Creon), a sequel to Antigòn) as a diasporic author. Notes 1 On these historical connections, see Jenkins 2021a. 2 J. Michael Dash aptly finds in the efforts of Les Griots ‘the rationale for a black cultural dictatorship’ (1981, 101), but I suspect that few could have predicted in the late 1930’s that such ideas would eventually lead to three decades of despotism. 3 The play debuted for an elite audience at the Rex Theater in Port-au-Prince and later went on tour internationally, but Morisseau-Leroy also brought the play to as many venues as possible across Haiti.

4

A Jumble of Names Fernand Hibbert’s Romulus (1908)

Fernand Hibbert (1873–1929) is the lynchpin tying together many of the themes and trends of turn of the century Haiti. His focus shifts away from the glorification of the Revolution and the injustices of the French colonial past and looks to more recent events, including the growing influence of the U.S., which would change the course of Haitian history through its occupation of the country from 1915 to 1934. Hibbert’s wry and satirical tone sits half-way between the riddling lightness of Bergeaud’s ‘lake of lies’ (Chapter 2) and the more thoroughgoing genre deconstruction of Dany Laferrière (Chapter 8), and his novella Romulus reacts to Bergeaud’s use of the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus.1 One of his central innovations that differentiates Hibbert’s work from that of Bergeaud and most nineteenth-century authors is his focus on the Haitian people, both with a welter of historical figures, many of whom never attained the fame or importance of the great leaders of the Revolution, and in his fine-grained presentation of Haitian communities collectively. On this score, his style may be an outgrowth of Firmin’s valorization of the broader project of Haitian nationalism, but it is certainly a pre-cursor to Jean Price-Mars’ ethnographic analysis of the realities of sub-elite Haitian society.2 And his inclusion of realistic bits of Haitian language and Vodou practice draws from Firmin’s Pan-Africanism and the inchoate négritude movement, which would lead to a more open acknowledgement of the linguistic and spiritual realities of Haiti, as in Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn en Kreyol, composed entirely in Creole and reconceiving the Greek myth of Antigone in a Vodou idiom. Hibbert’s political ideas were also formed in the crucible of Firmin’s career. Firmin was a member of the Liberal Party, which in 1883 led an uprising after a defeat in parliamentary elections, rallying under the meritocratic slogan of ‘power to the most capable’ (against the National Party’s populist ‘power for the greatest number’). Romulus (1908) offers an account of this Liberal Insurrection, centered in Miragoâne, where Hibbert had been born a decade earlier. Firmin’s opposition to President Lysias Salomon’s handling of the Liberal Insurrection led Salomon to get Firmin out of the way by asking him to represent Haiti at the Centennial Celebration of Simón Bolivar in Caracas in July of 1883. Firmin, recognizing that he was not welcome at home and taking advantage of the comparative ease with which Haitian elites could find welcome in France, spent the rest of Salomon’s presidency DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-7

106  A Jumble of Names in Paris.3 After publishing De l’égalité des races humaines in 1885, Firmin returned to Haiti in 1889 (after Salomon stepped down from the presidency and died in Paris) and took a leading role in frustrating the efforts of the U.S. to acquire Môle Saint-Nicolas.4 Around the time that Firmin returned home, Hibbert was moving in the opposite direction across the Atlantic to begin his studies of law and politics in Paris. By the time Hibbert returned to Haiti in 1894, Firmin was a leading political figure, and in 1902 his bid for the presidency led to a wave of political violence that nearly plunged the country into civil war. Firmin, the intellectual and academic, had massive popular support but was opposed by the militarism of General Pierre Nord Alexis (1820–1910), and Firmin found himself in the unsavory position of leading a militant faction. Alexis eventually gained the upper hand and became president, and Firmin went into exile in Saint Thomas where, like Bergeaud before him, he died in 1911.5 Firmin’s role in the 1902 election may have partially inspired Hibbert’s Romulus. This novella recounts the 1883 Liberal Insurrection in which Jean-Pierre Boyer Bazelais (1833–1883) led a hundred Haitian exiles to Miragoâne, a city west of Port-au-Prince on the southern peninsula.6 Bazelais was the head of the Liberal Party that opposed President Salomon (1815–1888), and his uprising spread to the important southern cities of Jacmel and Jérémie. Somewhat like Firmin, Bazelais had strong political convictions that ultimately led not to an improved Haiti but to civil turmoil and suffering. Salomon besieged Miragoâne, and in less than a year the uprising collapsed due to starvation, sickness and supply shortages. Like Bergeaud, Hibbert eschews traditional historiography in his account of Bazelais’ movement and builds his tale around the rebooted figure of Romulus, but whereas Bergeaud turned to the romanticism of the historical novel, Hibbert chose historical satire.7 His Romulus is explicitly connected to the Greco-Roman past and surely responds to Bergeaud’s formulation of the myth of Romulus and Remus, but Hibbert’s title character is, first and foremost, a caricature of local politics. He joins Bazelais’ uprising and shouts the slogans of political reform to his dying breath, but he never actually understands the ideals that Bazelais espoused nor the core problems of Salomon’s administration. Hardly the founder of a new nation, Hibbert’s Romulus is of no great historical import as an individual, and as a representative of a segment of Haitian society his poorly understood revolutionary ardor exacerbates political instability. If Romulus focuses on the Liberal Insurrection, which Hibbert witnessed first-hand as a child in Miragoâne, and evokes the militant failure of Firmin’s 1902 presidential bid, it also decries the power-vacuum that such conflicts create and that would lead to the U.S. occupation of Haiti less than a decade after its publication in 1908. Hibbert’s Romulus In a brief prologue, Hibbert presents Miragoâne of early 1883 as a happy and prosperous place. Neither a backwater nor the hub of the nation, the city feels like a perfectly typical example of urban life, where the title character plays an important

A Jumble of Names  107 part: ‘The police commissioner, General Romulus Joseph . . . was the town’s own son. Miragoâne was proud of Romulus and Romulus would boast about the town. They were made for each other. Also, since Romulus has ceased to exist, Miragoâne is no longer Miragoâne.’8 Hibbert’s native city has ceased to exist only in terms of the destruction of his idealized presentation of his childhood memory or, less romantically, in terms of its economic prosperity prior to Bazelais’ intervention, but this intimate connection between the lifeblood of the town and its police commissioner suggests that Romulus was more than an incidental figure in local history. Or perhaps the claim that ‘Romulus has ceased to exist’ has as much to do with the Roman myth and Bergeaud’s novel as with the local history of Miragoâne. That kind of Romulus, who transforms the world according to his will, no longer exists. Whatever Hibbert had in mind, his re-use of the name Romulus, so powerful at generating stories, combined with his existential connection to the city launches a game of names that runs throughout the short novel. Romulus becomes increasingly serious and historical as its narrative progresses (much as Bergeaud’s claim about the lightness of his novel slips into a welter of historical details later in Stella), but the first three (of twelve) chapters focus on the picaresque character of Romulus himself. Chapter 1 offers basic biography (1–4): he is average height, has skin ‘of the handsomest black’ (1, noir du plus beau noir, 17), fifty-eight years old, literate only enough to sign his name (which he does enthusiastically at every opportunity), well respected and deeply respectful of the Catholic church. He declines to commit to baptism, however, because he is married to two women and refuses to renounce either, since he loves them equally. With the mixedrace (mulâtresse) Virginia, he has eleven children, including Toussaint and Christophe; with Isménie, who is black (négresse), he has thirteen, including Pétion, Boyer and Rothschild. None of his nineteen other children is named, but even this partial family sketch paints a lively picture. Revolutionary histories and racial categories are introduced, but they are quickly confounded as the mixed-race mother has children named for black Revolutionary heroes, and the black mother has children named for leaders of the mixed faction. Rothschild comes as a surprise twist, and Hibbert explains the jumble of names in this way: ‘By thus aligning the often-adversarial national colours with Jewish finance, Romulus considered himself to have proved his political sagacity to the nation’ (2).9 None of these children plays a significant role in the story to follow, and the idea of demonstrating political acumen by naming mixed-race children after black figures and vice versa may suggest the pointlessness of efforts to ease racial tensions in Haiti via administrative fiat, such as Article 14 of the 1805 Constitution that declared all Haitians to be black. Chapter 2 follows Romulus’ unorthodox career as a police officer, with three bizarre examples of his methods. He solves a burglary by immediately recognizing that the thief could only have been one of his deputies. He prevents a man named Ti-Bita, whose name is Creole and who may be a Vodouist, from committing suicide by arresting and torturing him for the crime of trying to end his own life.10 And he establishes a well-oiled system of skimming a percentage of all imports coming into the port of Mirogoâne.

108  A Jumble of Names In Chapter 3, rumblings of revolution are heard, and the first person to be denounced by Salomon’s government is a goldsmith named Scipionnice Scipio. Everyone knows that Scipio is innocent, and so Romulus announces loudly and publicly that he has been instructed to arrest the poor man in order that Scipio might be alerted and have plenty of time to flee. When Romulus and his deputies succeed in failing to catch the alleged revolutionary, a chain-reaction of punishments follows with everyone from President Salomon down to Romulus’ junior-most officers pointing fingers. Eventually the local administration is sacked, because of this egregious failure to defend the public good, and Salomon himself orders that Romulus be fired. With the firing of Romulus, Miragoâne and Hibbert’s tale both fall into confusion and a chaos of names. In addition to Romulus’ brood of Revolutionary children (several carefully assigned by name to the ‘wrong’ racial category) and the Greco-Roman names Romulus and Scipio (the family name of several prominent Roman leaders, including Scipio Africanus), Hibbert has also introduced Sulla, the local hatter but also an ancient Roman general and political leader (138–78 BCE), and Coriolan, another official of Miragoâne who shares the name of a general from the distant Roman past (5th c. BCE). As if to confirm that the situation in Miragoâne continually blurs into the Revolutionary and Greco-Roman overlays, Hibbert captures the moment by conflating Haiti with ancient Rome and Greece (16): At the market, in the streets and under the galleries, people spoke in hushed voices, remarks that would shock any stranger – the type of remarks that must have circulated under the Roman Republic: “Brutus stayed home – and Scipio? I heard he was taken in? – Never! – Seems that Sulla is on the run! – But Sulla is a nobody – Nobody’s a nobody; everyone’s a suspect – There’s no reason for this to be happening – Someone implicated Cicero – No! – Yes, Caesar Octavian has arrested him.” Elsewhere in the town, it seemed like you’d been transported to Athens, on the Pnyx or in the Agora: “And Demosthenes? – He wasn’t worried; such a quiet man – That’s fair – But Aristides was arrested under Mrs. Euripides’ gallery – Oh, the poor devil! – Yes, it was Aristomenes that took him.”11 For a moment, Hibbert allows the historical reverberations of key names among his Miragoânais populace (Sulla, Scipio) to spin away from his main narrative. These lines ensure that readers recognize the historical overlay, but the fit is intentionally imprecise. Many of the names in this passage never recur in the novella nor does he include the most obvious example of this mirroring effect, namely the case of Romulus himself. This shaggy overlay prompts several questions. Is Miragoâne about to replicate the Roman transition from Republic to Empire? Or lead a Philhellenic defense of democratic freedom? Or follow the reborn heroes of 1804 into a new era of Haitian greatness? Hibbert’s satire and the political realities of the moment will impede any sure answers. The next several chapters shift toward grim political realities, such as a recollection of mass executions of political dissidents in Saint-Marc and Gonaïves in

A Jumble of Names  109 May 1882, and debates about the value of revolutionary action. ‘ “Whoever isn’t with me is against me!” was the declaration of the new Restorer. Since Dessalines, people had kept trying to restore this poor country, a country that only wanted one thing: to be left in peace’ (17).12 This sentiment comes from the novella’s narrator, but both its general tone of frustration and its depiction of Dessalines as the first source of Haiti’s cyclical instability fit with the perspective of Étienne Trévier, who is introduced in detail in these pages (after appearing initially as the person who had been robbed by one of Romulus’ deputies in Chapter 2). Trévier is a successful Miragoânais merchant who serves as the anti-revolutionary voice of moderation and economic development throughout Romulus. In opposition to him stands Octavius Merlin, a civic administrator, devoted champion of the theatrical arts and a political idealist of the Bazelaisist stripe. Octavius easily charms Romulus with his fiery opinions and a friendly nickname (you old tiger!, 19; vieux tigre, 32) given not out of affection but because Octavius could not remember Romulus’ actual name. Yet from this moment of feigned affection, Octavius lures Romulus into becoming an ardent partisan of Bazelais’ movement but without Octavius’ understanding of the issues at stake. Some of the most interesting moments of the novella emerge from the discussions of political theory in which Romulus repeats valiant-sounding slogans while Trévier or the narrator speak for the advantages of stable quietism and Octavius or Bazelais articulate support for revolutionary action. All parties agree that President Salomon is failing, and the point of debate is whether a revolutionary movement would ameliorate the situation or not. Shortly before Bazelais lands at Miragoâne, Trévier, Octavius and Romulus have their most involved political debate.13 Octavius’ point is simple: Salomon is bad, Haiti deserves better, and revolution is the answer. Romulus reiterates this in a blend of French and Haitianized French: ‘ “My dear sir,” Romulus said in a profound tone, “Haiti’s a black man’s country, and a black man’s country is not a white man’s country. When a government’s not good, you hafta overthrow it and replace it with a good government, m’I right, Octavius?’ ” (24–25).14 Matthew Robertshaw’s translation of Romulus’ words follows Hibbert’s own alignment of standard French with ‘proper’ speech and more highly developed political thinking, and the very inclusion of Haitian linguistic realities at all offers a vision of Haiti that was almost completely ignored in nineteenth-century literature.15 Against Octavius and Romulus, Trévier argues that too often revolutionary action leads only to instability and that the best long-term plan is to promote education and business development. Romulus and Octavius insist that Trévier and all Haitians will reap the benefits of Bazelais’ inevitable triumph, to which Trévier responds with a reassessment of Haiti’s hallowed origins: ‘There’s never been a revolution by the people of Haiti like there has in France, notably in 1830 and 1848’ (27).16 And when Octavius counters with the victory of 1804, Trévier continues: ‘The War of Independence . . . was essentially a military coup. It was by terrorizing the fieldworkers and shooting the hesitant that Dessalines was able to raise the masses against the whites. And what masses! Of the thirty thousand combatants, there were twenty thousand soldiers and only ten thousand armed farmers. That’s

110  A Jumble of Names what Dessalines, after all his hard work, was able to raise: ten thousand men out of a total population of five hundred thousand inhabitants in 1803! – The revolution of 1843 [which ousted Boyer] was similarly carried out by the military, at the behest of the bourgeois who were only really interested in military decorations though they ranted about the principles of liberty. The other Haitian revolutions are all the same; the pikes are raised with the army behind them’ (27).17 By the end of the novella, the aggressive idealism of Octavius and Bazelais has been proven, at least in this case, to be reckless and detrimental, and Romulus never figures out what he is fighting for. But what should we make of Trévier’s surprising denial that the Haitian Revolution was anything more than a military coup? The answer to this question hangs, in part, on the way in which one reads Hibbert’s satirical vision. If one sees an alignment between the author and Trévier, as Robertshaw suggests in the Forward to his translation, then the cautious merchant emerges as a tragic figure whose wisdom is ignored by those with too much revolutionary enthusiasm and who rightly rejects the grandeur of Haiti’s founding narrative. But if Trévier, too, is part of Hibbert’s satirical program, as I suspect him to be, then his heterodox view of the Revolution and his anti-political insistence on economic development by doggedly avoiding violent conflict at all costs are also fodder for satire just like the misguided positions of the other main characters. Some support for the latter reading emerges as Romulus enters its next phase. Bazelais lands in Miragoâne, Salomon’s forces surround the city, and the siege begins. Hibbert juggles generic tones in a manner that recalls the etymology of the Latin satura as a kind mixed ‘salad’ or ‘sausage’ that achieves its full realization by bringing together disparate flavors. The narrator offers the gnomic wisdom that ‘myths belong to everyone, especially in revolution’ (44).18 As Miragoâne begins to suffer from the shortage of supplies, the nobility of the cause founders against the poor understanding of its true meaning: ‘never before had such a heroic, emotional and bloody drama unraveled in front of such a naïve audience’ (46).19 This naiveté brings satire to its comic extreme of ridiculousness as the narrator describes ‘. . . two or three Cubans [who had arrived with Bazelais], who were never quite sure what they were looking for in Miragoâne. These unfortunates represented the comedic element in the romantic drama in which they found themselves, but the type of heartbreaking comedy that only real life knows how to produce’ (46–47).20 Eventually, the satirical history reaches something of a balance point that will be maintained to the end, as the siege is said to be ‘as famous as that of Troy’ (47).21 Surely the point of this comparison is that the cyclical instability of postRevolutionary Haiti could never rise to the epic crescendo of Trojan mythology. Hibbert’s reiteration that the siege of Miragoâne lasted ten months seems to echo, on a smaller scale, the ten-year siege of Troy.22 Yet despite this difference in scale, Hibbert’s novel also suggests that the depredations committed at the fall of Troy would be repeated in full at the sack of Miragoâne. Indeed, that process begins early as Trévier, with a shrug of resignation, learns that his shop has been looted and burned by American non-combatant soldiers, erasing his huge stockpile of coffee and lumber that he had been ready to sell. His political moderation may, in

A Jumble of Names  111 retrospect, have been the better plan, but even so he failed to capitalize on his ideals for economic growth, and so when, in their final political conversation Romulus fails to articulate any of the principles of Bazelais’ insurgency, Trévier’s moderation seems nearly as flawed as Romulus’ empty partisanship. The siege drags out as hunger and disease erode the Miragoânais insurgents. Trévier plans to leave the doomed city, and as he bids farewell to Romulus and Octavius, he is shot in the head by a stray bullet, dying immediately. Soon after the random and pointless killing of Trévier, Bazelais also lies on his death bed. This ‘providential man, divinely created by special decree to save Haiti’ (75) might have cut a heroic figure in a romantic epic, but neither Hibbert’s era nor his genre needed such a colossus.23 Instead, Bazelais never learns that ‘countries that don’t consider their citizens can’t rely on a person; true citizens don’t wait for a deliverer, they do what must be done themselves!’ (ibid).24 Salomon may be rightly cast as a tyrannical ‘Tiberius Caesar’ (ibid, César Tibère, 84), but Bazelais dies in October 1883 without realizing the practical impotence of his ‘abstract, revolutionary, idealist mind’ (76).25 With the lifeblood of the revolution gone, the story staggers to an end that might have been tragic if it were not presented as being so flawed from the beginning. With everyone acknowledging that the movement has lost its leader, Epaminondas Desroches briefly steps in to guide what is left of the resistance. Although Desroches was a real historical figure, the name Epaminondas recalls both the general who briefly made Thebes the strongest polis in Greece from 371–362 BCE and the title character of Frédéric Marcelin’s 1901 novel Thémistocles Epaminondas Labasterre. Desroches is an inspiring leader in battle, and the narrator asks ‘what Achilles did this man contain?’ (77).26 But whereas both the Greek Achilles and the Achilles of Vertières, Capoix-la-Mort, discussed in the previous chapter, could turn the tide of battle with their individual heroics, Epaminondas Desroches fades away from the story immediately after this heroic comparison. He falls ill, but Hibbert never mentions his moment of death.27 In this fleeting mention of the Achilles of Miragoâne, Hibbert notes that it is unfortunate that his heroism was proved by fighting against fellow Haitians, and this leads to the comment that puts Romulus into direct confrontation with the idealized status of ancient Greece (78): ‘Apart from the Persian Wars, Greeks only ever fought against Greeks, and yet, the fame of those among them that stood out in these civil wars has survived for centuries, because patriotic writers never fail to bring outstanding accomplishments to light.’28 Fame and historical significance hinge on the role of patriotic writers; ancient Greece, well stocked with aspiring story-tellers, ensured that outsized achievements in civil conflicts were viewed historically through a heroic lens. Since this commentary comes as Epaminondas receives Homeric accolades, we might assume that Hibbert is inserting himself into the tradition of such ‘patriotic writers’. But since his praise for Epaminondas is so superficial and since Epaminondas’ role in the conflict proves so inconsequential, Hibbert’s words about ancient Greece can be read in a different, anti-canonical way. Rather than accepting the greatness of ancient Greek heroism and insinuating himself and Epaminondas into that tradition, Hibbert deconstructs such national heroism altogether. Epaminondas is a new Achilles only because the original

112  A Jumble of Names Achilles, like most famous Greek military leaders (excepting those involved in repelling Persian invasions), was an overly glorified combatant in corrosive civil strife (though, again, Hibbert is stretching the Greek situation in order to make this comparison). Ultimately, this comment shows Hibbert, true to his satirical inclinations, rejecting any aspirations of becoming a new Homer and suggesting, instead, that much of the canonical greatness of ancient Greek militarism has been overhyped in ways that ultimately led to the foolhardy revolutionary spirit of a Bazelais or an Octavius Merlin. The final chapter of Romulus recounts the inevitable collapse of the insurgency paired with a scene of a family reunion dripping with mock sentimentality. The defenses of Miragoâne crumble, and those who are not wounded or sick evacuate the city and scatter into the hills. Meanwhile, in Port-au-Prince President Salomon hosts a victory dinner with his wife, his top aides, and Admiral Cooper, introduced at this late stage as the commander of a U.S. warship docked in the harbor but not taking part in the Bazelaist conflict. Salomon has prepared a special surprise for his party, and they are soon joined by Captain Cooper, the son of the admiral and briefly the commander of a Haitian cruiser that had just arrived to Port-au-Prince towing the Bazelaisists’ only battleship. The reunion of father and son, both guests of Haiti and officers in the U.S. military, felt ‘as if [it happened] in the final act of a play. It was too much for the president’s guests. Each cried unreservedly’ (88).29 As Hibbert’s satire consumes the tragic genre, the sentimentality of this moment, when neither father nor son had been in any real danger, contrasts bitingly with the surrounding descriptions of the end of the insurrection. Around Hibbert’s portrait of Salomon’s dinner party, the fall of Troy is repeated in Miragoâne. Sick and wounded insurrectionists are executed, those who fled to the hills are tracked down, women are ‘mistreated’ (86, maltraitées, 96), noncombatants suffer the same fate as those who took up arms, and the lucky ones take their own lives before Salomon’s troops catch them. Octavius Merlin dies without fanfare, and the entire operation is mopped up. Romulus, seemingly the last to be captured in January 1884, is executed by firing squad. Defiant to the end, he shouts ‘Down with the tyrant!’ as the soldiers fire their guns and ‘Long live liberty!’ (90) as he expires on the ground. His death brings the novella to a whimpering close.30 Hibbert’s Romulus tells a story not of the Haitian Revolution but, rather, of Haiti’s revolutionary history in a period in which the role of the U.S. was displacing France as Haiti’s primary international concern. From the vantage of 1908, just a few years after the centennial of the Revolution, the fact that Haiti already had a revolutionary history, fueled in no small part by the economic instability caused by the indemnity agreed to between Boyer and Charles X in 1825, was itself a sad commentary. The triumphalism of 1804 has already begun to fade in Hibbert’s novel because of the failure to establish a more stable system. The assassination of Dessalines in 1807, Christophe’s suicide in 1820 as his regime crumbled, and major militant uprisings in 1843 (to oust President Boyer), 1883 (the Liberal Insurrection), 1902 (around Firmin’s presidential bid) and early 1908 (a second Firminist uprising) outlined a grim narrative. And so, as Hibbert turned to the figure of Romulus in a satirical mode, he unfolds a history that provides rich national commentary.

A Jumble of Names  113 Hibbert’s Romulus As discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, the ancient Romulus was the mythical founder of Rome, the city that would rise to imperial hegemony across much of what we now call Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, but that Roman mythical narrative was built around the foundational crime of fratricide. Any mention of Romulus’ brother Remus offered instant criticism of Roman power, by demanding that the costs of Roman growth and success be addressed openly. Bergeaud’s Stella reworks this legendary origin story to present Haiti as a successor to Roman greatness that has managed to avoid the taint of fratricide. Bergeaud reimagines Romulus and Remus as the leaders of the black and mixed-race factions in the Revolution, and his version of the story transfers responsibility for brotherly violence away from Romulus and Remus and onto the oppressive system of French colonialism. Although Bergeaud laments Dessalines’ violent purge of the remaining French population living in independent Haiti and although at times he seems to favor the mixed-race tradition of Remus (Ogé, Rigaud, Pétion) over the more Africanist Romulus (Louverture, Dessalines), his novel is incredibly optimistic about the overall goodness and greatness of the Haitian achievement in throwing off the yoke of European colonialism. As a reaction to these two versions of the myth, Hibbert conjures a new iteration of Romulus who both speaks for and calls out the shortcomings of Haitian society. In both the Roman myth and Bergeaud’s Stella, Romulus and Remus are statuesque fictions who neither have nor need rich personal characterization, but Hibbert creates a compelling portrait of a minor civic official. At times amusing, prideful or stupid, Hibbert’s Romulus feels typical against the earlier idealizations of the mythical figure. He is greedy on a small scale, a bit of a trickster, eager to see himself as important, aware (but not too concerned) that his two marriages are something of a local scandal, and until he loses his job as chief of police for intentionally undermining the order to arrest the innocent Scipio, he has kept things in Miragoâne on an even, if not always fair or equitable, keel. In a nutshell, Hibbert’s Romulus exists everywhere and at all times, but he is never the lynchpin of historical transformation. Far from founding a new nation, this Romulus never manages to get his head around the nation in which he lives and takes the easier route of endorsing slogans that sound noble. One wonders: had he not lost his job, would Romulus have fought against Bazelais’ uprising with the same devotion he gave to the insurrection that began soon after he was fired? Bergeaud imagined a version of Romulus who does not kill his brother, and this has sprawling implications both for his optimistic vision of Haitian nationalism and for his facility at hacking a canonical European myth so that it could become useful to a nation born from anti-colonial violence. Hibbert takes a different tack by crafting a Romulus who does not have a brother at all. It is, in fact, surprising not to find the name Remus in these pages, since Hibbert so frequently plays with the relationship between Miragoânais figures and characters of the same name from the distant Haitian or Greco-Roman past. But if this Romulus does not have a Remus, he certainly engages in a fratricidal conflict, and one way of approaching Hibbert’s novella is

114  A Jumble of Names to see it as a story in which Remus (President Salomon’s forces) crushes Romulus (and everyone associated with the insurrection in Miragoâne). Or perhaps, as with the names of Romulus’ children (the black Pétion, the mixed-race Toussaint, et al.), Hibbert’s title character has been constructively ‘misnamed’ and can be understood as a new Remus, destined to be crushed by the Rom(ul)an hegemony of Salomon. Or again, since Romulus no longer exists, perhaps the choice of names doesn’t matter at all. Whatever the case, Hibbert’s engagement with the fratricidal myth lays bare the corrosive consequences of Haiti’s inability to forestall civil strife. The reappearance of Romulus in Hibbert’s work offers a direct rebuttal to Bergeaud’s optimism and his allegation that fratricidal strife in Haiti can be blamed on European colonialism, but Hibbert also provides a broader satirical reassessment of the classical tradition. One hallmark of the Menippean strand of satire is a radical change of physical scale and perspective, as when Swift’s Gulliver visits the tiny Lilliputs and the enormous Brobdingnags or in Aristophanic journeys to the Underworld and Heaven in Frogs and Peace, respectively, and Hibbert fosters a similar effect with the social scale of familiar names.31 By teasing his readers with a Sulla and a Scipio, who are just local merchants, Romulus’ brood of revolutionary children, who leave no impact on the story or the world, an Octavius so different from the Roman Octavian, and a Romulus who achieves nothing like the earlier incarnations of that name, Hibbert both brings quotidian realities of Haitian life into focus and erodes some of the pretensions of the larger-than-life figures of the past. At times, this dynamic feels quite negative, as when the siege of Miragoâne and the fleeting greatness of Epaminondas Desroches are compared facetiously to the siege of Troy and Achilles. Yet if such comparisons sometimes suggest that the classical past is more impressive than the story of Miragoâne, Hibbert’s satire also pulls in the opposite direction. Indeed, perhaps the most important example of hacking the classical tradition in Hibbert’s novel does just this. As the denunciation of the Miragoânais Scipio leads to Romulus’ firing and social chaos, Hibbert reminds us that Rome and Athens also endured civil unrest and many of the most famous episodes of Greek military history were, by modern standards, intranational conflicts. Such comments level history in a way that calls on the present not to be overawed by the past (whether it be hallowed or over-hyped). In ancient Rome, the likes of Romulus, Sulla, Octavian and Scipio remade their worlds, but they also caused enormous collateral damage in the process. For Haiti in 1908, having weathered both the Liberal Insurrection and the recent civil unrest involving Firminists, one message that could be drawn from Romulus is that the next wave of Haitian heroes needs to be precisely those merchants, hatters, jewelers, patrons of the arts and civic officials who can consolidate the progress Haiti had made during its first century of existence while providing a firewall against instability. Conclusion: Creole and Vodou in Romulus Bergeaud had turned to the myth of Romulus and Remus to develop his vision of a national brotherhood built upon the rejection of the racialized legacy of the colonial past. The rapprochement between the brothers that he orchestrates not

A Jumble of Names  115 only pushes back against the authority of the received mythical tradition, but it also represents an idealized national unity that overcomes divisions based on skin color. Hibbert returns to that myth, now hacking both the canonical Roman tale and, presumably, Bergeaud’s romantic spin on it, and his Romulus opens the door to another kind of national unity. Against the presentation of Haiti as a country that was overwhelmingly Francophone and Christian (identities most reflective of wealthy urban elites), Hibbert introduces other cultural elements, especially realities of the Haitian language and Vodou spirituality of the vast majority of the population. Although Hibbert does not present these latter aspects of Haitian society in a particularly positive light, his commentary covers the breadth of Haitian realities and holds the entirety of Haitian society before the mirror of his satire. This aspect of Hibbert’s style is most clearly seen in the many moments when Romulus (or occasionally another character) slips into Creole or Haitian French. For the likes of Boyer, Bergeaud and Firmin, whose works were studied in the previous chapters, French was the only conceivable language for elevated Haitian discourse, and little interest in Vodou is overtly discernible in their works. Even Dessalines, who, by most accounts, had been born into slavery, whose first language was Creole, who decried every legacy of French colonial power and who lived on after his death as the Vodou lwa Ogou Desalin, issued his edicts in French and never expressed official support for Vodou.32 As Robertshaw has discussed (2018, 2019), Hibbert was part of the vanguard of authors, together with Georges Sylvain, Frédéric Marcelin and Justin Lhérisson (the latter of whom wrote the lyrics to the Haitian National Anthem, which includes a clear nod to the Roman poet Horace), who began to incorporate such realia of Haitian life into their writings.33 It may not be a coincidence that this group also shared a satirical tone, since satire is the genre par excellence for incorporating all manner of material. In Hibbert’s era, the status of Creole as a language was very much in doubt, and many prevailing perspectives viewed it as a form of bad French that should not be considered an independent or autonomous language.34 This castigation of Creole was standard among Francophone elites during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the fact that Creole was (and remains) the primary verbal idiom of nearly all Haitians. Not until the post-Duvalier constitutional reforms of 1987 was Creole recognized as a national language on par with French. This early disregard for Creole was powered by (and a reflection of) the racism that denied intellectual capabilities to anyone of African descent and the elitism that assumed a superiority for French language and culture. Before any strongly theorized and activist advocacy for Creole emerged (a movement that gained momentum after the U.S. occupation), Haitian authors of the early twentieth century began to include more realistic elements of Haitian life in their writing in ways that expanded the cultural scope of Haitian literature. Hibbert, for example, does not make any strong or progressive calls for validating Creole on a large scale, but his inclusion of any words or phrases other than standard French is revolutionary in itself. That said, it is not always clear how to categorize the realistic Haitian verbal culture that Hibbert includes beyond noting that it is neither ‘proper’ French nor

116  A Jumble of Names modern Creole. One challenge to distinguishing Creole from French in this era is that Creole orthography was not standardized until well after Hibbert’s career, leaving an author free to transpose spoken Haitian onto the page in various phonetic formats.35 Another major issue is that French and Creole admit a huge amount of lexical and grammatical interchange, an intermediate linguistic space often termed kreyòl fransize or Creole francisé, i.e., Creole turned in the direction of French.36 When we also consider the ways in which a satirical author such as Hibbert can play with speech patterns (accent, diction, grammar, etc.) to generate humor and convey matters of social register, it becomes impossible to definitively assign certain passages of Romulus to one language as opposed to another. Hibbert frequently glosses passages of his text that are not in standard French in footnotes, which suggests that he expects some among his French audiences to be unfamiliar with Haitian verbal realities. For example, to the phrase ‘les bonsmounes’ he adds the note les gens de bien (1908, 12, with original italicization). In this case, bons-mounes ‘good people’ is clearly drawing on the Creole word meaning ‘person’ that is spelled moun in the modern orthography.37 More convoluted is the situation in which the Catholic priest asks Romulus to leave one of his two wives and the latter responds with a blending of French and Creole: Pè, m’pas capable fait ça. M’rainmin tous lé deux (1908, 14). Hibbert’s footnote renders Romulus’ words this way: Père, je ne puis pas faire cela. Je les aime toutes les deux, ‘Father, I cannot do that. I love both of them’. Some of Romulus’ phrasing is clearly Creole (such as m’pas capable and m’rainmin, which approximate the modern phrases m pa kapab, ‘I can’t,’ and m renmen, ‘I love’), but much of the rest could be explained as French, Haitian French or phonetic Creole. This uncertainty similarly surrounds Hibbert’s glossing of Romulus’ terse and seemingly obvious response to the priest oui, pè. Does Hibbert gloss this as oui, père (‘yes, father’) in order to show that Romulus is speaking in Creole or in a form of Haitian French? For my purposes, the answer to that question is less important than the recognition that Hibbert is introducing realities of Haitian verbal culture into his writing in ways that cannot be paralleled in nineteenth-century literature. The mixture of languages and registers is carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense, and it generates plenty of predictable humor. Hibbert weaves quite a bit of Haitian language into his text, but he is more sparing with depictions of Vodou. Not coincidentally, however, whenever Vodou is present, so too is Creole or Haitian French. One such scene has already been mentioned in passing but deserves closer scrutiny. As already noted, the opening chapters include a story about Romulus preventing Ti-Bita from killing himself by, among other things, beating him with a cocomacaque (also written coco macaque and koko makak). Just before this word appears in the text, Romulus gives this order to his men: Rafraichissez-le, sans soulever son orgueil (1908, 12 with original italicization). This phrase literally means ‘freshen him up, but don’t take all his pride’, but Hibbert glosses the line as Battez le, mais ne le tuez pas – car Ti Bita n’était pas un voleur. Robertshaw follows this gloss and renders Romulus’ words as ‘Beat him up, but don’t kill him’ (leaving off the note’s explanatory ‘because Ti Bita is not a thief.’) In clarifying Romulus’ words, Hibbert may have felt compelled

A Jumble of Names  117 to explain the phraseology of Haitian French or to decode the euphemistic banter of police officers. Whatever the case, he does not offer any such explanation in the next line when he describes Romulus’ men beating Ti Bita with a cocomacaque, though Robertshaw glosses the Haitian word as ‘voodoo walking stick’ (7). A cocomacaque can be a simple walking staff or a police officer’s ‘Billy club’, but some sources ascribe to it the power to walk on its own and kill with a single blow.38 This latter connection would create a humorous interplay of meanings here. On the one hand, Romulus says (as is made plain in Hibbert’s note), ‘beat him but don’t kill him’, but on another register the use of the cocomacaque suggests something else altogether: ‘don’t let him commit suicide – just kill him!’, since the touch of the magical staff can be deadly. By leaving the word cocomacaque un-defined, Hibbert permits readers to bring their own understanding of this word to the situation, allowing those familiar with the cocomacaque’s mystical reputation to find a humorously contradictory message.39 Another example of this connection between Haitian language and Vodou appears late in the siege of Miragoâne when an houngan named Ti Blanc promises to assassinate Bazelais both for the sake of ending the siege and for a large sum of money. Both the name Ti Blanc and houngan are Creole, and the latter designates a male expert practitioner of Vodou. Hibbert glosses houngan with the condescending sorcier (sorcerer) whereas Robertshaw offers the more neutral ‘voodoo priest’. Ti Blanc’s plan is to pretend that he is a pig, on the assumption that in this disguise he can avoid attracting the attention of the besieged and thereby creep up close enough to Bazelais to kill him. Under cover of night, he puts his plan into action, crawling on all fours with a hog-yoke around his neck and grunting like a pig. As it turns out, the besieged soldiers are so hungry that they are ecstatic to discover a pig, which they immediately kill in hopes of enjoying some pork (67–68). This vignette may have deeper implications beyond its account of a poorly planned assassination attempt. In historical terms the combination of a houngan, a pig and a revolutionary context suggests a replay of the Bois Caïman ceremony, where the various accounts recall that the houngan Dutty Boukman offered prayers and oaths, a mambo (most often named Cécile Fatiman) killed a pig, and the Haitian Revolution began. The Creole ti-blanc similarly evokes the legacy of SaintDomingan racial categories, since it is the equivalent of the French petit-blanc, the name given to the ‘little whites’, the class of Europeans who were economically below the planters known as the grands-blancs, or ‘big whites’. In addition to such historical associations, Hibbert’s tale may cast a mocking glance at the belief that certain Vodouists had the power to shape-shift into various animals including pigs.40 There is even a secret society known as the champwèl or cochons sans poil, and these ‘hairless pigs’ have the power to shed their skin or shapeshift in order to work evil during the night.41 Ti Blanc tries to become a pig convincingly enough to end the siege of Miragoâne, but by crawling on all fours and grunting like a pig under cover of darkness he only managed to get himself killed. A very different association, not strongly cued by the text but certainly possible given Hibbert’s engagement with ancient Greek and Roman mythology, connects Ti Blanc’s plan with a scene in Homer’s Odyssey in which half of Odysseus’

118  A Jumble of Names crew are temporarily turned into pigs by Circe.42 Her magical powers effect a more complete transformation than Ti Blanc manages, but that may have as much to do with the difference in genre between the romantic adventuring of the Odyssey and Hibbert’s satirical tone in Romulus. In addition to the parallels involving human bodies that take on the form of pigs, both narratives turn on the issue of extreme hunger. When they first arrived on Circe’s island, the crew had been on the verge of starvation until Odysseus killed a stag that was as impressive as it was easy to kill. This moment can initially seem unimportant, but the poem soon explains that Circe has the power to turn humans into various animals, including lions and wolves in addition to pigs. This variability of her power suggests that the stag killed earlier by Odysseus, which had been striking to see and strikingly easy to kill, may have been a person transformed into a beast.43 Drawing together these two scenes by Homer and Hibbert, we find at least the outlines (neither text is explicit) of a common narrative in which men who are starving kill and eat a human because they were tricked into thinking (or covered their shame by claiming) that person was an animal. However one reads these scenes in Romulus involving Vodouists, such as Ti-Bita and Ti Blanc, and interjections of realistic Haitian verbal culture, Hibbert’s eclectic style is far removed from anything found in nineteenth-century Haitian literature. The inclusion of Vodou and Creole present a more complicated and nuanced vision of Haitian life that pairs the familiar world of urban Francophone elites with the humbler commonplaces of most Haitians. If it took the omnivorousness of Hibbert’s satire to create a space for the ‘lower’ cultural registers of everyday life, especially in terms of Creole (or Haitian French) language and Vodou, then texts such as Romulus created a footpath where Jean-Price Mars and Félix Morisseau-Leroy would soon build a highway. But those stories would only emerge after the period of Haitian history shaped by the U.S. occupation, which would dominate the social, political and economic narrative from 1915 to 1934. Notes 1 Scènes de la vie haïtienne: Romulus was published in Port-au-Prince in 1908. Quotations in English and French follow, respectively, Hibbert 2014 and Hibbert 1988. 2 Price-Mars praises Hibbert as one of the leaders in creating a distinctively Haitian literature (1928, 181–82). 3 Price-Mars 1978, 136–146 analyzes in detail Firmin’s relationship with Salomon. 4 The U.S., under President Benjamin Harrison, sought to acquire Môle Saint-Nicolas in order to establish a naval base in the Caribbean. A contingent of ships arrived to Portau-Prince in hope of quickly forcing a deal, but the U.S. did not work in conjunction with its own Minister in Haiti, none other than Frederick Douglass. Firmin was serving as secretary of state for exterior relations under President Florvil Hippolyte and succeeded at delaying negotiations so long that popular sentiment in Haiti rose in opposition, and negotiations fell apart. The U.S. would acquire Guantanamo Bay from Cuba in 1898. For more on the Môle Saint-Nicolas affair, see Hoffmann 1997–1998 and Polyné 2006. Stieber 2020, 218 n. 65, notes that Firmin was criticized at the time for negotiating with the U.S. at all, which seemed to be a sign that he was open to such foreign ownership of Haitian territory. 5 For more on Firmin’s presidential campaign in 1902 (and his second effort to gain the presidency in 1908) see Péan 1977/1993, Dubois 2012, 196–201 and Gaillard 1992.

A Jumble of Names  119 6 Janvier 1885 offers an important contemporary account of the Insurrection. Price-Mars 1948 does so as well and includes a wealth of primary documents. Price-Mars’ thinking about the situation in Haiti in 1883 is directly connected to his experience of World War II, and his short monograph uses the Liberal Insurrection as a case study on the challenges of fostering effective but not oppressive governance in any community. He also acknowledges the basic historical reliability of Hibbert’s account, even though it is composed as a novella (12). For the most updated discussion of the Liberal Insurrection and the wider political debates of this era, see Stieber 2020, 201–226. 7 On Hibbert’s role in the history of Haitian literature, see Gindine 1975 and Robertshaw 2018 and 2019. 8 The prologue is unpaginated in the English edition. . . . le Commissaire de Police, M. le Général Romulus Joseph, était bien fils de la cite. Miragoâne était fière de Romulus et Romulus s’enorgueillissait de Miragoâne. Ils étaient faits l’un pour l’autre. Aussi depuis que Romulus a cessé d’exister, Miragoâne n’est plus Miragoâne (16). 9 En associant ainsi les couleurs nationales et souvent adversaires à la finance juive, Romulus pensait donner au pays une preuve incontestable de sa sagesse politique (18). 10 Ti-Bita is a Creole name, and Romulus orders that he be beaten with a coco macaque, which is a traditional Vodou staff. Presumably this is Ti-Bita’s own coco macaque unless the police are carrying such items. In the Duvalier era, the coco macaque was often associated with state-sponsored violence. 11 Au marché, dans les cours, sous les galeries; on échangeait à voix basse des propos capables de rendre ahuris des étrangers qui les eussent entendus – des propos commet il devait en circuler sur le forum aux beaux temps de la République Romaine: – ”Brutus est resté chez lui. – Et Scipion, on dit qu’on l’a retrouvé?–Jamais de la vie.–Il paraît que Sylla est en fuite!–Mais Sylla n’est “dans rien”–Personne n’est dans quoi que ce soit, on arrête les suspects.–Il n’y a pas de raison pour que cela finisse jamais.–On vient de mettre la main sur Cicéron.–Non!–Si, c’est Octave César qui l’a arrêté.” Dans un autre groupe, on se fut crû transporter à Athènes, sur le Pnyx ou sur l’Agora: “–Et Démosthène?–Il n’a pas été inquiété, du reste, un homme si tranquille–C’est juste.– Seulement on a arrêté Aristide sous la galerie de Madame Euripide. – Oh! Pauvre diable!–Oui, c’est Aristomène qui l’a pris” (30). 12 “Qui n’est pas avec moi est contre moi!” avait déclaré solennellement le nouveau Régénérateur. Depuis Dessalines, eux tous viennent régénérer ce pauvre pays qui n’a jamais demandé qu’une grâce: c’est qu’on le laisse tranquille (31). 13 This scene can be read against the so-called constitutional debate in Herodotus (History of the Persian Wars, 3.80–82), in which three characters speak in favor of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy, respectively. 14 Mon chè, dit Romulus d’un air profond, Haïti cé pays nègres, et pays nègres, pas pays blancs. Quand un gouverment pas bon, il faut le renverser pour mettre à sa place un gouverment bon. Pas vré, Octave? (38). The underlined words represent Hibbert’s phonetic representation of oral Haitian language. In his review of Robertshaw’s translation, Léger 2014 criticizes Robertshaw’s failure to differentiate three verbal registers more clearly (standard French, Haitian French and Creole) and his decision to render Romulus’ words in this passage into improper or low-register English. Léger addresses Robertshaw’s rendering of the French il faut as ‘you hafta’ on p. 124. 15 Robertshaw 2018, 2019 discuss the growing use of Creole in this era by Hibbert as well as Georges Sylvain, Justin Lhérisson and Frédéric Marcelin. His work presents a fascinating historical contour in which a Creole literature began to develop at the start of the twentieth century only to have that movement halted by the U.S. occupation. ‘Initially, Haitian intellectuals tended to cleave to the French component of their cultural heritage as a way of contesting the validity of the Occupation. Emphasizing their Latin refinement in contrast to Anglo-American materialism and coarseness of manners, they inadvertently curtailed the embryonic Creole movement . . .’ (2018, 7). 16 . . . il n’y a jamais eu de révolution faite par le peuple en Haïti, comme cela s’est vu en France, notamment en 1830 et en 1848 (40).

120  A Jumble of Names 17 La guerre de l’Indépendance . . . fut une œuvre essentiellement militaire. C’est en terrorisant les cultivateurs et en fusillant les plus tièdes, que Dessalines a pu réussir à soulever les masses contre les blancs. Et quelles masses! Sur les trente mille combattants, il y avait vingt mille soldats et seulement dix mille cultivateurs armés. Voilà ce que Dessalines, en déployant toute son énergie, avait pu lever, dix mille hommes sur une population totale de cinq cent mille habitants en 1803!–La révolution de 1843 fut également faite par des militaires à qui s’allièrent des bourgeois qui ne rêvaient qu’épaulettes tout en déclamant sur les principes de liberté. Il en est de même des autres révolutions haïtiennes, y compris les soulèvements de piquets derrière lesquels il y eut toujours des militaires (40). Price-Mars, speaking, as always, on behalf of the lower strata of Haitian society, says something quite similar: Describing the upshot of the Revolution, he claims that ‘there was only a substitution of masters. As radical as this change of regime appeared to be, it was only accomplished through a monopoly of public authority by an audacious and energetic minority. In fact, the social system remained unchanged’ (1983, 105). A decade later but still two decades removed from his presidency, Francois Duvalier followed Price-Mars in terms of seeing no broad uplift for black Haitians in the Revolution. With his co-author, Lorimer Denis, he wrote that the triumph of ‘1804 was more of an evolution than a revolution’ (. . . 1804 représente plutôt un Evolution et non une Révolution, 1939/1940, 623.) 18 . . . les mythes appartiennent àtout le monde–surtout les mythes révolutionnaires (53). 19 . . . jamais drame plus héroïque, plus poignant et plus sanglant ne se déroula devant un peuple ignare (56). 20 . . . trois ou quatre Cubains qui ne surent jamais au juste ce qu’ils étaient venus chercher à Miragoâne. Ces malheureux représentaient l’élément comique dans le drame romantique où ils se trouvaient jetés, mais d’un comique navrant comme seule la vie réelle sait nous en offrir le spectacle (57). 21 . . . autrement fameux que celui de Troie si célèbre (57). 22 Ancient parodies of martial epic played similar game with scale. For example, the Batrachomyomachia or The Battle of Frogs and Mice (listed as a Homeric poem in ancient sources but clearly a late parody, possibly by Lucian of Samosata) reduced Homer’s strapping heroes to tiny creatures, and a passage of Plautus’ comic play Miles Gloriosus (The Pompous Soldier) describes a guest overstaying his welcome to a period of ten days as odiorum Ilias, ‘an Iliad of torments’ (740–744), clearly punning on the overlap between a long, ten-year war and a long, ten-day visit. 23 . . . l’homme providentiel créé par un décret spécial de la Divinité pour sauver Haïti (83). 24 . . . les pays qui ne comptent plus de citoyens, n’ont pas à espérer un homme; les vrais citoyens ne se remettent pas à un seul du soin de tout faire, ils font ce qu’il y a à faire eux-mêmes! (83). This sentiment achieves its grandest end in Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew, 1944, translated into English in 1947 by Langston Hughes) by Hibbert’s son-in-law, Jacques Roumain. In this novel, a masterpiece of Haitian literature, Manuel, ‘Roumain’s Sophoclean hero’ (Danticat 2010, 45), returns to his small Haitian village after years working in the Cuban sugarcane fields and saves his town by contriving a system of irrigation that benefitted everyone. 25 . . . son cerveau abstrait de réformateur idéaliste (84). 26 Qu’est Achille à côté de cet homme? (87). 27 Price-Mars 1948, 112 preserves a note that he died from illness on November 20. 28 En somme, à part les guerres Médiques, les Grecs n’ont jamais lutté que contre des Grecs; cependant, le renom de ceux d’entre eux qui ont brillé dans ces guerres intestines est arrivé jusqu’à nous, par la raison que les écrivains nationaux ne négligèrent jamais de mettre en lumière les actions d’éclat qui s’y rapportaient (87). Strictly speaking, each polis of ancient Greece was its own political unit, and ancient Greece was not a

A Jumble of Names  121

29 30 31 32

33

34 35

36 37 38

39

40

nation (though it was briefly unified under the empire of Alexander the Great and later under Roman hegemony). A conflict such as the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), therefore, was not technically a civil war but, rather, a war among various Greek states or poleis. The case of the semi-mythical Trojan War is rather different, in that Homer never describes any of the combatants as ‘Greeks’ (Hellenes). He describes the ‘Greek’ side as Achaeans, Danaans or Argives interchangeably. The Trojans, meanwhile, are not Greek either, but they seem to speak Greek and worship Greek gods, and the Ionian coast (where Troy was located) was usually considered to be part of the Greek world throughout the classical era. Although Hibbert’s point does not hold up to strict historical analysis, his general critique about the regularity of Greeks fighting Greeks can certainly be supported. . . . tout comme en un cinquième acte. C’était trop pour la sensibilité des convives présidentiels. Chacun pleura abondamment (97). A bas le Tyran! . . . Vive la liberté! (100). For Menippean satire, see Relihan 1993 and Weinbrot 2005. I here follow the standard account of Dessalines’ origins. Jensen 2012 emphasizes the possibility that he may have been born in Africa, which would mean that he was not born into slavery in the Caribbean and that his first language would not have been Creole. Stieber 2020, 213 finds this trend already discernible in Janvier 1884 short, fictional narrative ‘Le vieux piquet’. The National Anthem, La Dessalienne, opens with the phrase Il est doux et beau de mourir pour la patrie, ‘It is sweet and beautiful to die for the fatherland’, a French rendering of Horace’s dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Odes 3.2.13, published about 23 BCE). The only substantive difference between the two lines is that Lhérisson’s emotional beau, ‘beautiful’, contrasts with the more austere Roman virtue of decorum, ‘proper’ or ‘fitting’. The only discussion of this connection between Lhérisson and Horace that I have found is Jean 2019 (a blog). I am grateful to Matthew Robertshaw for his help in fleshing out this bibliography on the emergence and history of Creole: Hoffman 1984, Schieffelin and Doucet 1992, Lang 1997, 2004, Spears and Joseph 2010. For matters of orthography, see Faraclas et al., 2010 and Schieffelin and Doucet, 1992, which makes the important case that ‘the process of creating an orthography for Kreyòl . . . [is] an important symbolic vehicle for representing its speakers in terms of national and international identity’ (427). For an updated discussion of la francophonie haïtienne, see Govain 2020. And for a closely related parallel case, see N’Zengou-Tayo 1997. This same phrase appears in Tassos, a collection of poetry published by Milo Rigaud in 1933. The passage is reprinted in Charles, 2000, 66. Such lore is common in online sources, but I have found only limited confirmation among more scholarly publications. Wilkinson 2019, 84, witnesses a ritual in which a mambo uses a coco macaque and claims that it has these powers. Warner-Lewis 2003, 210 refers to ‘magical powers’ associated with koko makaks in Martinique. And Bartlet 2014 somewhat salaciously notes that ‘some voodoo sorcerers own a magic stick called a coco macaque that walks by itself and is sent out to perform vengeful deeds.’ The word cocomacaque appears a second time in Romulus in the aftermath of Romulus’ failure to arrest Scipio. As higher-level officials foist the blame onto their underlings, the lowest level police officers take their anger out on an unnamed local and beat him to death with their cocomacaques for having allegedly stolen a turkey. This issue is discussed from many perspectives in Derby 2015. Among other fascinating details, Derby includes the photograph of a statue of a boy transforming into a pig by André Eugène (400).

122  A Jumble of Names 41 The earliest reference to the cochons sans poil that I have found in Haitian literature is Lhérisson’s Zoune chez sa ninnaine: fan’m gain sept sauts pou li passé published in 1906. The title of this short novel, which the author described as a lodyans, roughly a ‘folktale’, is French for ‘Zoune at her godmother’s’ and the Creole subtitle means ‘Women have seven trials to endure’. 42 This tale is picked up by later authors such as Plutarch, whose Gryllus (Grunter or Oinker) depicts Odysseus being out-smarted by a pig (formerly a member of his crew) who has no interest in returning to human form. 43 This idea is explored in more detail by Roessel 1989.

5

Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside Jean Price-Mars, Ansi Parla l’Oncle (1928)

If Hibbert’s Romulus sent a cautionary message to Haiti of 1908 about the need to promote stability as a primary national objective against the looming presence of American militarism, then his novella’s warning went unheeded. In 1915, the U.S. invaded Haiti in the name of fostering development and stability, even as it confiscated Haiti’s gold reserve in the name of fiscal responsibility.1 (The following year, the U.S. also occupied the Dominican Republic, in part out of fear that Germany could use the country as a base from which to launch attacks against the U.S., and it would, effectively control all of Hispaniola until 1924.) Like many Haitians, Hibbert ardently opposed the U.S. presence, especially after the widely publicized assassination of Charlemagne Péralte in 1919, but if his novels speak largely through the coded language of satire, his slightly younger compatriot, Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969) was blunter.2 As Hibbert was writing his early novels, Price-Mars was giving lectures so influenced by the work of Anténor Firmin that President Nord Alexis labeled him a ‘Firminist’.3 Such language was not purely academic but, rather, harked back to Alexis’ violent assertion of his presidential victory over Firmin in 1902 and his suppression of sporadic Firminist uprisings throughout his presidency. This cast Price-Mars not just as a member of an intellectual tradition but as a real political threat. And Alexis’ charge was quite apt, since Price-Mars clearly looked to Firmin as a model. Like Firmin he built a career that combined engaged political activism and scholarship. Like Firmin his mission of championing the people of Haiti was honed by the barbs of racism in Paris.4 And like Firmin he provided an intellectual defense of the Haitian people rooted in progressive social science. Price-Mars’ last published work was a biography of Firmin, which cements the intertwined legacies of the two men. If Firmin was the towering Haitian intellect of the nineteenth century, then Price-Mars may fill that role for the twentieth. In terms of their perspectives on Haiti, a key difference between Firmin and Price-Mars is that the former responded to the physical anthropological debates of his era (Is there a physiological basis for race? How did the different races arise? Is there a racial hierarchy?), whereas the latter worked primarily in the new field of ethnography, eventually founding the Institut d’Ethnologie in Haiti in 1941. As Price-Mars’ career developed, he repeatedly called for a unification of the Haitian classes (as opposed to Bergeaud’s and Firmin’s focus on issues of race), and he DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-8

124  Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside placed the burden for initiating this transformation squarely on the elite, as articulated in his 1919 La vocation d’élite. As Hibbert wrote his final novel, Les Simulacres (1923), which directly addresses the crisis of occupation, Price-Mars was moving further into ethnological research by conducting the fieldwork that informed his most influential work, Ainsi parlà l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle, 1928).5 This study of rural, agrarian life in Haiti in many ways develops both Firmin’s championing of the Haitian people as the racial heirs to ancient Egypt and Hibbert’s focus, satirical though it be, on the realistic presentation of Haitian life, including the Creole language and Vodou religious practices. Robertshaw has argued that this focus on Haitian realities that gained momentum at the beginning of the twentiethcentury came to a grinding halt with the U.S. occupation as Haitian elites retreated to more familiar Francophile habits.6 Against this backdrop Price-Mars launches his criticisms of those who have ‘donned the old frock of western civilization’ (7).7 One element of this critique involved the reframing of Haitian history less in terms of the exceptional triumph of enslaved Africans over European masters and more in terms of the longer and deeper, if less explosive, impacts and legacies of colonization. The ‘old frock’ that Price-Mars rips away was rooted in a form of ‘European liberalism’ that rendered ‘Africa and generally all that is Africanderived – especially the Vodou religion . . . as barbarous and a hindrance to progress and civilization’.8 Price-Mars’ ideas challenged and unsettled such elite values, and Miranda has described the eventual move away from French influence as a kind of Oedipal process of differentiation from the past.9 This comment builds upon the Freudian Oedipal theory, but it also reflects Price-Mars’ own habit of using Greek and Roman material in order to distinguish Haitian culture, an amalgam of European, African and Caribbean inputs, from the Francophone tradition. As Price-Mars builds his arguments, he relies on ancient Greek and Latin sources far less than Firmin had, but he does something noteworthy with this material nonetheless: instead of comparing the growing promise of Haitian culture to the high-points of classical grandeur or seeing Greek sources as the prooftexts of the blackness of ancient Egypt, Price-Mars likens the Haitian peasantry to peasantry of any place and time, including the sub-elite majority of the ancient Mediterranean.10 In doing this, he constructs a rhetorical position (glancingly implied, perhaps, in some passages of Hibbert’s Romulus) that inverts the logic of an elevated ‘classicism’ and that must have ruffled the feathers of adherents to the Francophone classical curriculum. He argues less that the greatness of the ancient Greece and Rome could be found again in Haiti (one of Firmin’s key points) but, more importantly, that the everyday life of the Haitian majority differed little from the quotidian realities of the ancient Mediterranean (and, indeed, elsewhere). The main message of Price-Mars’ Ainsi parlà l’oncle is that Haitian elites need to shake themselves out of their ‘collective Bovaryism,’ which he immediately explains as a society’s ability to see itself as something other than what it truly is (much as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had done in the novel that bears her name). In this case, Price-Mars points his finger at those Haitian elites who see themselves as ‘ “coloured” Frenchmen’ (7–8).11 Whereas so much earlier Haitian literature had addressed questions of race (as in Bergeaud’s vision of a Haitian nationalism built

Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside  125 around the triumph of brotherly love over colorism or Firmin’s idea that black Haiti was rekindling the greatness of the black culture of ancient Egypt), Price-Mars is far more concerned with a division rooted in cultural practices and economic disparities. Although the two approaches cannot be completely disentangled, PriceMars presents the fragmentation of Haiti in terms of the urban elites’ efforts to ignore the lifestyle of the nation’s overwhelming majority, as seen most particularly in the Creole language and Vodou religion – both of which have deep roots in Africa.12 Years later, C. L. R. James would reflect this theme from a wider Caribbean perspective by saying that ‘the road to West Indian national identity lay through West Africa’ (1963, 402). Early twentieth-century discussions of Creole and Vodou follow the same basic template of exploring the constituent components of these hybrid constructs, most often in order to deny their legitimacy: Creole was not a language but, rather, a patois or a form of bad French, and Vodou was not a religion but the antithesis of religion. As Haitian elites officially embraced and endorsed the Christian faith and the French language, Creole and Vodou were devalued and ignored (or, at best, covertly supported).13 Price-Mars is progressive, even radical, in validating the legitimacy of both. He acknowledges that Creole emerged from a mixture of African and European languages, but he denies that it is any sort of ‘pidgeon’ (24, ‘petit nègre’,16)’.14 Far more than this, he sees Creole as the foundation of national unity. He wonders if it should eventually become the Haitian language, just as France has French, Italy has Italian and Russia has Russian. Creole is fundamental to Haitian identity: ‘It is thanks to Creole that our oral traditions exist, are perpetuated and transformed, and it is through this medium that we can hope some day to bridge the gulf which makes of us and the people two apparently distinct and frequently antagonistic entities’ (25).15 As for Vodou (which Price-Mars spells Vaudou), he describes it (in terms that prefigure C. L. R. James’ similar comment The Black Jacobins) as ‘the leaven of the revolt against odious oppression’ and even suggests that Vodou coalesced into a distinct phenomenon in the insurrectionist gatherings, such as Bois Caïman, that erupted into revolutionary action (107–08).16 Both Creole and Vodou admit major African influences, but Price-Mars devotes more energy to demonstrating this for the case of Vodou.17 As he does so, he frequently draws on the language or imagery of ancient Greek and Roman discussions of religion, perhaps encouraging his Francophile audience to accept the Vodou pantheon just as they had all been trained to accept ancient Greek polytheism not as a religion but as a cultural system of aesthetics, story patterns and values.18 Early in his presentation of popular beliefs in Haiti, Price-Mars aligns his insights with the Epicurean idea that religion emerges from humans’ fear of natural phenomena, and he underlines this connection by quoting in Latin two lines of Petronius (Poems 3.1–2): primus in orbe deos fecit timor, ardua coelo/fulmina dum caderent, ‘fear first created gods in the heavens when blazing lightening fell from the sky’.19 This citation serves less to offer any cultural patina of classical authority to his argument (though his Francophile readers might understand it as such) but more to move toward his insights about the universality of religious

126  Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside experience. Thus, as he explores the African roots of Vodou, he concludes that ‘[t]he animism of the Negroes is . . . nothing other than a religion of primitive man,’ even suggesting that ‘all primitive peoples in all ages have worshipped the Unknowable in the same ways’ (86).20 Again, he emphasizes this point by turning to the ancient Mediterranean: ‘Is it not true that Greek mythology is the daughter of the mild atmosphere of Attica “where the nine sacred Muses of Pieria cherish Harmonia of the golden curls” according to the magnificent symbolism of Euripides?’ (86).21 The ‘fundamental unity of Negro animism’ (87), which presents plenty of variation across time and space, is not so much justified by but, rather, is a parallel example of ‘the Aristotelian formula that the divine envelopes all of nature’ (91).22 All three of these references, to Petronius (1st c. CE), Euripides (5th c. BCE) and Aristotle (4th c. BCE), facilitate Price-Mars’ tracing of Haitian beliefs back to Africa where religion is shaped by the same forces that are canonically attested in Greek and Roman cultures. African ‘Negros’ were scared of natural phenomena and so too were ‘primitive’ Greeks; the mythology of African animism emerged from regional ecosystems, as did Greek mythology; and all this is due to the divine influence of nature, as similarly expressed in African ritual and Aristotelian theory. As Price-Mars shifts from the African antecedents to Haitian realities, this pattern of referencing the ancient Mediterranean persists. He describes amorous, rustic songs about ‘the love-maddened Cleopatras and the Sapphos’ (27) of the Haitian countryside.23 The totality of the Vodou lwa amount to ‘an Olympian pantheon of gods’ (39) or a ‘voodooistic Olympiad’ (169).24 The frequently ithyphallic Vodou lwa Legba is a kind of Priapus, a Greco-Roman fertility god often associated with farms and agricultural fields who was easily recognized by his oversized erection (98). Price-Mars reiterates Saint Méry’s point that Vodou ceremonies replicate a ‘bacchanalia’ (112), and he notes the sacred role of dance in Greco-Roman antiquity (115). Saint Méry recounts a form of snake worship that Price-Mars claims no longer exists, but he accepts that such specifics may have changed over time and quotes Élie Lhérisson on the importance of snakes at both Epidaurus and Rome (1899, 114). Epidaurus, the center of Asclepian healing in Greece, is mentioned again in a discussion of healing miracles at Lourdes and within Vodou (163–64). And in describing the trance often experienced in Vodou ritual, he quotes in French Virgil’s description of the Cumaean Sybil: ‘Her voice no longer mortal as soon as she is breathed upon by the spirit of the approaching god’ (nec mortale sonans, adflata est nominee quando/iam propiore dei, Aeneid 6.50–51).25 Price-Mars never analyzes these points of contact between Haiti and the ancient Mediterranean in detail, but he also avoids placing the traditional canon on a hallowed pedestal. The high-status luxuriance associated with Cleopatra (1st c. BCE) and Sappho (6th c. BCE) are found in popular song, and many comparisons are made not from atop the Athenian Acropolis or via marble statuary but with extra-urban religious contexts associated with Priapus, the Sybil and the ecstatic power of Dionysus. Price-Mars, thus, assembles these comparanda not to set them beside the greatest examples of Haitian high-culture (as Firmin had done) but to liken them to Haitian commonplaces.

Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside  127 The only extended engagement with Greco-Roman culture in Ainsi parlà l’oncle appears in the final chapter, which is the transcript of a lecture delivered in 1922. At the start of his talk, which forms the conclusion to his book, Price-Mars reintroduces the concept of the collective Bovaryism of the Haitian elite. He warns his audience and readers: ‘Beware, my friends, are not such sentiments resting on the groundwork of scandalous ignorance? We subsist on ideas rancid from the stupendous stupidity of an ill-balanced culture and our puerile vanity is not satisfied until we mumble phrases written to please others in which we glorify “the Gauls our ancestors” ’ (204, with original emphasis).26 In order to disabuse his audience of this ‘Pharaseeism of our conventional falsehoods’ (187),27 Price-Mars again turns to the Haitian peasantry. This time he offers a sketch of rural family life, built around the relationship of a typical young man and woman, from their first flirtations to marriage. The passage feels in many ways like a prefiguring of Jacques Roumain’s description of Manuel and Annaïse in his novel Gouverneurs de la Rosée (1944), but Price-Mars uses this vignette to segue into a demonstration that the marriage customs of the Haitian peasantry share core similarities with such rituals in ancient Greece, Rome, the Congo, Sudan and Dahomey. Price-Mars, in accordance with his focus on ethnology, sees the universality of social forces as the starting point for comparing disparate cultures (205): ‘Love, Hunger, and Fear have given rise to the same fables in the ardent imagination of men – whether they live in the tangled brushwood of the Sudan, whether they appeared in olden times on the hills where the Acropolis arose or on the shores of the Tiber where the City of the Seven Hills was built.’28 In building this argument, he reads two long extracts from the French classicist Fustel de Coulange’s La Cité Antique (1864) about marriage rites in Greece and Rome (205–07). These pages fit into Price-Mars’ larger argument by calling his audience’s attention to the humble realties of daily life and ritual, rather than invoking any exceptionalism of Greco-Roman cultural attainment. In so doing, the similarities with Haitian cultural rhythms feel obvious, because ancient Greece and Rome are presented not in terms of their elitist ideals but through patterns familiar to any agrarian society. All these connections among Haiti, Africa, and the ancient Mediterranean contribute to Price-Mars’ articulation of the fundamental hybridity of all cultures. Most obviously this is expressed through his presentation of hatianité, which he summarizes as the combination of the ‘survivals of the land of Africa, the contributions of European colonization, the ephemeral shadow of aboriginal memories, and finally the continuous exertions of local transformations under the dual pressure of a still unsettled civilization and the resistance of a mentality that has never been touched by doubt’ (186).29 But if such ‘New World’ hybridity feels inevitable, he insists that no ‘Old World’ input is either pure or isolated. Christianity, for example, has been shaped by a kind of ‘religious fermentation’ involving inputs from Israelite ritual and history with Greek philosophy and even pagan moral principles (40, 166–7). All such constituent parts, brought together from Africa and Europe and made distinct in the crucible of the Caribbean, contributed to ‘the mystical tonality’ that was ‘drawn from the common reservoir of ideas, sentiments, acts, gestures which constitute the moral patrimony of Haitian society’ (174).30 On the one hand this

128  Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside means that Haitian elites should not spurn the habits and manners of their rustic compatriots in their rush to associate themselves with all things French, and, on the other, that the peasantries of the ancient Mediterranean were neither better nor worse than nor meaningfully different from the Haitian communities championed by Price-Mars. This style of hacking classical forms not only participates in PriceMars’ ethnographic habit of focusing on and valorizing non-elite aspects of society but also implicitly undermines the logic of coloniality that brought the classical curriculum to the Americas as part of a misguided ‘civilizing’ mission. As a final example of Price-Mars’ thinking, which also segues into the next chapter, I turn to the humblest of genres, the animal fable. Early in Ainsi parlà l’oncle, he compares La Fontaine’s fables from ‘Old Europe’ to similar tales from Haiti: ‘I see more than just a comparison, there is perhaps a relationship between them!’ (19).31 This leads to the suggestion that Ti-Malice, a trickster figure of popular Haitian lore, who is known in some regions as ‘sly rabbit’ (19, compère lapin, 20), may be a biform of such animals as La Fontaine’s foxy Renard but also of similar characters from across the breadth of Africa and the African diaspora. This prompts Price-Mars to speculate that all such animal tales ‘issue from the same source as the fables of Aesop of the eastern Mediterranean’ (19).32 Aesop, the icon of Greek fables, is not set up as the source of but, rather, as an early witness to, this shared tradition. Much later in the book, La Fontaine appears again in an overview of the emergence of a distinctively folkloric Haitian literature. In 1901 Georges Sylvain (1866– 1925) published Cric? Crac! Fables de La Fontaine racontées par un montagnard haïtien et transcrites en vers creoles. The title derives from the Haitian (and widely Caribbean) tradition of beginning a story-telling session with the performer asking the audience Cric?, to which everyone responds Crac!, and that call-and-response title reappears nearly a century later with Danticat’s phonetically equivalent Krik? Krak! (1995). The conceit of Sylvain’s text is that he has transcribed into Creole verse the stories of a Haitian Montagnard, evoking both the Haitian town of Montagnard and the French political party of the same name that opposed to the Girondins in the era of the French Revolution. Sylvain’s Cric? Crac! includes Creole and French versions of an original prologue and thirty-one fables. These fables all have parallels in La Fontaine’s collection, but Sylvain has adapted each to Haitian verbal and cultural idioms. Price-Mars praises Sylvain’s mastery of both French and Creole, but asks ‘why did he need to pattern his thought on that of the ingenious fabulist?’ when he ‘could have achieved a magnificent original creation if he had forgotten La Fontaine and instead drawn his subjects entirely from the legends and tales of Haiti’ (179).33 This question about Sylvain’s Creole adaptation of La Fontaine’s fables captures the complexities of Price-Mars’ thinking. On the one hand, Sylvain has achieved something commendable by fostering a Creole literature, but on the other, he has relied too much on the French model. And yet Sylvain has so thoroughly reworked that model that it seems probable that Price-Mars finds fault not with Sylvain’s actual stories but with the presence of La Fontaine as a figurehead. For George Lang, who analyzes the relationship between Sylvain and La

Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside  129 Fontaine in terms of Genette’s concept of hypertextuality, Sylvain’s ‘La Fontaine is recognizable, but no more than La Fontaine’s Aesop would be to any reader conversant with the Greek tales’ (1990, 680). In an argument that builds upon this idea that Sylvain’s translation actually positions the French author on the margins, Robertshaw sees Sylvain’s reliance upon La Fontaine as a strategy to ‘legitimize the project to the Francophile intelligentsia’.34 Indeed, it seems that Sylvain and Price-Mars would likely agree that the fable is a transcultural narrative template. Thus, when the Wolf cooks the Lamb kon yon gonbo (‘in a gumbo’, 29) or when the City Rat feeds the Country Rat a buffet of Caribbean treats, such a callaloo (80), we seem to be precisely in that cultural zone that Price-Mars has explored in which ‘Old World’ ingredients have blended into a uniquely Caribbean stew. Lang even suggests that Sylvain’s project could be understood as a form of travesty since, from a conservative Francophone perspective, it presents ‘a vulgar version of a noble text’ (689), and this idea could be extended in a more aggressive direction to suggest that Sylvain intended to displace La Fontaine within the French literary canon. Neither Lang nor, surely, Price-Mars sees it this way, and I suspect, rather, that the latter’s frustration with Sylvain’s fables emerges from two primary issues. The first is that Sylvain openly declares his debt to La Fontaine, an iconic master of the former colonizers, without mentioning other cultural traditions, such as storytelling patterns from Africa. The second issue is that Sylvain’s prologue is openly hostile to Vodou (16–17): Si kè zòt kenbe sa byen Zòt va vini bon kriken Bwè tafya, tonbe nan bwa, Pèdi nanm yo nan dans Iwa, Volò bèf ki pa pou yo, Pase lannwit nan jwe zo. Na bo di mwen, se metye Pou moun ki pa pè Bonge!

Si vos cœurs gardent bien ceci, Vous deviendrez de bons chrétiens. Boire du tafla, se jeter dans les bois, Perdre son âme dans les danses du vaudoux, Voler des bœufs qui ne sont pas à soi, Passer ses nuits à jouer aux dés, Vous aurez beau dire, c’est là travail (Propre) à ce troupeau de gens qui ne craignent pas Dieu!

‘If your heart takes these tales as told you will become good Christians. Drinking home-brew, frolicking in the woods, risking your souls as you dance voodoo, stealing other folk’s cattle, spending your nights throwing dice, say what you will, these are the ways of those who do not fear the Lord.’35 This combination of spotlighting La Fontaine as the authoritative source of Sylvain’s fabular poems (as opposed to tracing them back, as Price-Mars does, to the same transcultural source that inspired Aesop) and denigrating the uniquely Haitian form of religious expression may have been enough for Price-Mars to wish that Sylvain had done something more progressive with his poetic fables. Indeed,

130  Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside given the paired role of Creole and Vodou in Price-Mars’ arguments about the character of the rural Haitian majority, it might have seemed logically incoherent that one could foster a Creole literature without similarly supporting Vodou. More than two decades after the publication of Ainsi parlà l’oncle Price-Mars may have felt that the potential of Sylvain’s undertaking was more fully achieved in a play that debuted in Port-au-Prince in 1953. In that play, which is the subject of the next chapter, Félix Morisseau-Leroy presented a thorough reimaging of Sophocles’ Antigone told completely in Creole and set in a world shaped by the powers of Vodou. Conclusion: On Not Being Athens

Price-Mars’ Ainsi parla l’oncle was published in 1928, four years after the U.S. ended its direct occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924) and six years before it would withdraw its forces from Haiti (1915–1934). His call to recognize and embrace Haiti’s African heritage can be understood, in part, as an effort to help the nation find its identity in a period when protracted control by a foreign presence had interrupted and derailed autonomous development across the entirety of Hispaniola. In the wake of the U.S. decampment, both Haiti and the Dominican Republic regained control of their mechanisms of culture through which to express their collective identities. The next chapter represents one strand of such work with Morisseau-Leroy’s Haitianization of the Greek myth of Antigone, but Price-Mars’ later career offers a window into the relationship between these neighboring nations that forms a fitting conclusion to these pages. In the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1891–1961) had quickly risen through the military ranks by working in lockstep with the occupiers. With the advent of independence, he soon took control of the military and in 1930 won a rigged presidential election. As he developed and solidified dictatorial control, which would last until his assassination in 1961, he leaned into colonial era propaganda that claimed Santo Domingo to be the ‘Athens of the New World’. Dan-el Padilla Peralta has recently discussed the manipulation of this rhetoric by Trujillo and his supporters (including a shift toward identifying as the ‘Sparta of the New World’), and part of his analysis hinges on the regime’s efforts at ‘scripting Dominican identity as classically pure and white and its Haitian counterpart of dark and criminal’ (2020, 90). Price-Mars enters this story through the expansion of his ethnographic arguments of 1928 to include all of Hispaniola. In 1953 (the same year that Morisseau-Leroy’s play would debut in Port-au-Price), he published a comparative ethnographic study of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and this volume broadened his earlier thesis by excavating the impact of African culture (framed largely in terms of the burgeoning négritude movement) in both societies. In this later work he has less frequent recourse to Greco-Roman antiquity than he had in Ainsi parla l’oncle, but in one chapter he touched a nerve that produced a strong classicizing reaction from the Trujillistas. This response is teased out by Peralta, and my aim here is merely to highlight Price-Mars’ comments and to show how differently he and Trujillo’s regime approached Greco-Roman antiquity.

Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside  131 In a chapter devoted to studying Haitian President Boyer’s plans and policies for controlling the eastern portion of Hispaniola from 1822 to 1844, Price-Mars confronts Santo Domingo’s colonial sobriquet. ‘A local tradition exists that it was the “Athens of the New World” ’ (Il y a bien une certaine tradition locale qui en fait l’Athènes du Nouveau Monde; 1953, 126). He immediately savages such a claim by denying that any artistic, literary or scientific flourishing had taken place in Santo Domingo that would warrant such a label, and he points out that a wave of Spanish emigration to Cuba and Puerto Rico had decimated the Dominican population between 1802 and 1822. As he builds his arguments about the influence of indigenous and African culture on Santo Domingo in the early nineteenth century, he quotes a long passage by Victor Schoelcher (1804–1893), the French abolitionist who had visited Haiti and the West Indies in the early 1840’s (when Haiti still controlled all of Hispaniola).36 Schoelcher describes residents in the eastern part of the island as ‘the greatest philosophers in the world’ (les plus grands philosophes du monde, Price-Mars 1953, 128), because they live more simply than Diogenes of Sinope (the founder of Cynic philosophy in 4th century BCE Greece) but without his exaggerated theatricality.37 For Price-Mars, like Schoelcher before him, there was no shame in realizing such humble ancestry, which was typical of the majority in any Caribbean, African or Mediterranean civilization. Indeed, Price-Mars is something of a modern Diogenes in his quest to shake Haitians and Dominicans free of their European pretentions so that they could embrace the truth of their African (and mixed, Caribbean) culture. Read from the perspective of Trujillo’s propaganda machine, however, PriceMars’ words were anathema. His rejection of the vaunt that the Dominican Republic was or ever had been the Athens of the New World and his insistence that Dominican and Haitian cultures were built upon a shared substrate that was primarily African chafed against Trujillo’s dogma that a white Dominican Republic needed to guard itself against the taint of Haitian blackness. Price-Mars’ work elicited an anti-Haitian response from Ángel del Rosario Pérez, a loyal Trujillista. Rosario Pérez’s El exterminacion añorada (‘The Longed-for Extermination’) was published in 1957 (coincidentally the same year that François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, Haiti’s dictatorial double of Trujillo, was elected) and argued both that the ‘Athens of the New World’ needed to transform into the more militant ‘Sparta of the New World’ to deal with the Haitian threat and that the genocidal purge of Haitians carried out by Trujillo’s forces in 1937 (the ‘Parsley Massacre’ that will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9) might need to be repeated. Like any Haitian elite of his era, Price-Mars had been trained in the same ‘classical’ curriculum grounded in the study of ancient Greece and Rome. But he was unusual for his time in denouncing the valorization of that cultural framework and calling for a recognition of the centrality of Africa in post-colonial Caribbean cultures. This idea contributed to the development of the Caribbean negritude movement, through figures (all younger than Price-Mars by a generation or more) like C. L. R. James (1901–1989), Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). But in directing this message toward the Dominican Republic, PriceMars set himself up as an enemy of Trujillo’s regime. His rejection of efforts to

132  Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside foreground any Greco-Roman pedigree for Hispaniola contributed to the rampingup of Trujillo’s ethnographic cant that, unlike Haiti, the Dominican Republic was the privileged heir to an idealized version of ancient Greece. Notes 1 Fundamental starting points for the Haitian resistance to the U.S. occupation of Haiti can be found in the volumes of La Revue Indigène and La Trouée, both of which were co-founded in 1927 by Jacques Roumain, Hibbert’s son-in-law. Castor 1971, Dash 1981, and Dalleo 2016 offer thorough assessments from the period after the occupation had ended. For a more focused discussion of Price-Mars and the U.S. occupation, see Delice 2018b. 2 Charlemagne Péralte (1885/6–1919) was a leader of the Cacos, a militant group that can be traced back to the Revolutionary era and that was based in the Haitian mountains. He and the Cacos led the resistance to the U.S. presence. When U.S. marines killed Péralte, they distributed a photograph of his corpse across the country in hopes of dissuading opposition, but the picture, especially because of its resemblance to Jesus on the cross, galvanized the opposition. Philomé Obin (1892–1986) painted two versions of the ‘crucifixion’ of Péralte, and Ernst Prophète (b. 1950) later painted ‘La Recrucifixion de Charlemagne Péralte’, in which one of Obin’s paintings is being hoisted onto a cross. A  wide-ranging reassessment of Péralte’s biography and cultural significance is now available in Alexis 2021. 3 Shannon 1996, 21. For the close intellectual connection between Firmin and PriceMars, see also Magloire-Danton 2005. 4 Price-Mars describes a turning point in his life that parallels Firmin’s encounter in Paris with the ideas of Broca and Gobineau. He was a twenty-year-old medical student and in a discussion about race among his peers, he extolled the greatness of Toussaint Louverture only to be rhetorically crushed by a French student who dismissed the Haitian hero as an exception among the otherwise inferior black race. Price-Mars describes this retort as rhetorically polite and sophisticated but, for him personally, mordante et corrosive, ‘biting and corrosive’ (1954b, 6). He tried but failed to respond, and this experience clearly inspired much of his life’s work to defend the integrity of the Haitian people. Magloire-Danton 2005, 162–163 discusses this episode. 5 Checking the wider Caribbean scene, Price-Mars’ career overlaps significantly with the slightly older Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969), who wrote several ethnographic studies of black culture in Cuba and its African roots. For a discussion of these closely linked figures, see Rivera-Barnes 2014. 6 Robertshaw 2018, Chapter 4, note 18. 7 . . . rêvetit la défroque de la civilization occidentale, 1954, i. Quotations in French and English follow, respectively, Price-Mars 1954a, and Price-Mars 1983. 8 Magloire-Danton, 2005 166. Hurbon 1988, 63–64 describes the popularity of European liberalism among Haitian elites as a strategy for social and political acceptance among major Euro-American nations. 9 Rodriguez Miranda 2018, 9–10. 10 See Shannon 1996, 23–24; Delice 2018a, 51–52 on Price-Mars’ opposition to classical education (based on the idea that such a path provides uplift only for elites) and the similarity between his position and that of Booker T. Washington. 11 . . . un bovarysme collectif . . . Français ‘colorés’ . . . , ii. 12 Mezilas 2018 and Delices 2018c offer important discussions of Africa in the wider Haitian intellectual tradition and in Price-Mars’ thinking in particular. 13 Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, colère et folie (1968) and Ida Faubert’s Une étrange histoire (1959) both involve the shocking revelation that the main character’s father had been a servant of the lwa.

Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside  133 14 On the emergence and history of Creole: Hoffman 1984, Schieffelin and Doucet 1992, Lang 1997 and 2004, and Spears and Joseph 2010. 15 C’est grâce au créole que nos traditions orales existent, se perpétuent et se transformant, et c’est par son intermédiaire que nous pouvons espérer combler un jour le fossé qui fait de nous et du people deux entités apparemment distinctes et souvent antagonistes, 17. 16 . . . le levain de la révolte contre l’odieuse oppression, 112. For a similar sentiment, see Mennesson-Rigaud 1958, 43. 17 This differential treatment may simply be the result of Price-Mars’ intellectual training and methods, which lend themselves more toward teasing out the history and meaning of Vodou practice than in the linguistic debates surrounding Creole. 18 Delices 2018a, 32 understands Price-Mars’ position within this broader intellectual history as the synthesis of Louverture’s French integrationism and the more nationalistic approach of Louis Boisrond-Tonnere, secretary to Dessalines, author of the Declaration of Independence and the first history of the Revolution composed by a Haitian. 19 This Latin passage appears without translation at Price-Mars 1954a, 31 (=1983, 38). As Price-Mars notes, the first half line is quoted by Statius (Thebaid 3.661) and the general sentiment is Lucretian. 20 L’animisne nègre n’est donc autre chose qu’une religion de primitifs . . . tous les primitifs de tous les temps ont adore l’Inconnaissable selon les mêmes modalités, 88. 21 N’est-ce pas que la mythologie grecque est fille de l’atmostphère clémente de l’Attique ‘où les neuf Muses sacrées de Piérie nourrissent Harmonie aux boucles d’or’ selon le magnifique sympolisme d’Euripide?, 88. The quotation translates Euripides’ Medea (830–32): ἔνθα ποθ᾽ ἁγνὰς / ἐννέα Πιερίδας Μούσας λέγουσι / ξανθὰν Ἁρμονίαν φυτεῦσαι. 22 . . . l’unité foncière de l’animisme nègre, 89; la formule aristotélicienne que le divin enveloppe la nature entire, 94. Price-Mars does not give a citation here, but he may have in mind something like Aristotle’s distinction between the ruler (arkhon) and the ruled (arkhomenon), which separates the Greek male citizen from the female and the slave. In this analysis, Aristotle positions nature (physis) as the active force in shaping such realities (Politics, 12521-b). 23 . . . sanglots émouvants des Cléopâtres et des Saphos affolées, 19. 24 . . . un Olympe innombrable formé de dieus, 32. 25 Sybils, female prophetic figures, were associated with various holy sites from Babylon to Italy to the Siwa Oasis in ancient Libya (modern western Egypt). The U.S. sculptor William Wetmore Story (1819–1895), who was a white abolitionist, created a Cleopatra (1858) and The Libyan Sybil (1861). Both sculptures were created with African features, the latter of which was modelled after Sojourner Truth, and both participated in debates about race in Civil War era U.S. For more on these sculptures, see Malamud 2019, 169–175. 26 Les Gaulois nos aïeux, 220. 27 le pharisaïsme de nos mensonges conventionnels, 201. 28 L’Amour, et la Faim, et la Peur ont engendré les mêmes fables dans l’imagination ardente des hommes – qu’ils vivent dans la brousse embrasée du Soudan, qu’ils parussent jadis sur les collines où s’éleva l’Acropole ou sur les bords du Tibre où s’édifia la ville aux Sept collines, 222. 29 . . . des survivances de la terre d’Afrique, les apports de la colonization européene, l’ombre fugitive des souvenirs aborigènes et, enfin, le labeur ininterrompu des transformations locales sous la double pression d’une civilization encore indécise et la resistance d’une mentalité que le doute n’a jamais effleurée, 200. 30 La tonalite mystique . . . puisé dans le reservoir commun des idées, des sentiments, des faits, des gestes qui constituent le patrimoine moral de la communauté haïtienne, 188. 31 J’y vois mieux qu’une comparaison, il y a peut-être une filiation entre eux!, 10. 32 . . . proviennent de la même source que les fables d’Esope de la Méditerranée orientale, 10.

134  Cleopatras and Sapphos of the Haitian Countryside 33 . . . pourquoi avait-il donc besoin de modeler sa pensée sur celle du génial fabuliste? . . . quelle magnifique création originale eut abouti Georges Sylain s’il avait oublié La Fontaine pour ne puiser ses sujets entièrement que dans les legends et les contes d’Haïti, 193. 34 Robertshaw 2019, 30. 35 My adaptation of Lang’s translation (1990, 682) with Sylvain’s orthographically modernized Creole and French. 36 Schoelcher appeared briefly in Chapter  3, where Firmin had similarly quoted an extended passage of his writing, and this parallel offers yet another link between the thinking of Price-Mars and Firmin. 37 Diogenes was famous for his dramatic rejection of typical social norms. Stories about him maintain that he slept in a large pot, he masturbated and defecated in public, and he embraced what ancient Greeks considered to be the shameful ways of a dog. The Greek word kynikos, ‘dog-like’, provides the name for his philosophical way of life: Cynicism.

6

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer Félix Morisseau-Leroy, Antigòn en Creole (1953)

‘Only when we understand language and its role in a colonial society can we understand the role of writing and the writer in such a society’ – Marlene NourbeSe Philip, ‘The Absence of Writing or How I almost Became a Spy’ (1989) ‘What makes a work “black”? The most valuable point of entry into the question of cultural (or racial) distinction, the one most fraught, is its language . . .’ – Toni Morrison, ‘Unspeakable Things Unspoken’ (1990)

In his 1946 French-language novel Récolte (‘Harvest’), Félix Morisseau-Leroy (1912–1998) wrote a dialogue in which two characters debate whether or not one could compose literature in Haitian Creole: ‘Do you think someone could write in Creole?’ ‘Sure, why not? Jean Rictus wrote in slang. He said everything he wanted to say.’ ‘Do you think that Creole would risk isolating the Haitian poet from the rest of the world?’ ‘Well, those who write pointless little sonnets in the purest classical French are no less isolated, since, as you know, no serious foreign reader wastes his time reading such drivel, unless for a laugh’ (1970, 102).1 These lines capture both the literary challenges facing Creole in the 1940’s and Morisseau-Leroy’s fascination with it. Despite the fact that writers, such as Hibbert, had been sprinkling Creole into their French texts and Sylvain had published his bi-lingual edition of Haitianized versions of some of La Fontaine’s fables, Creole had not yet gained traction as a literary language.2 The epigraphs to this chapter by Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Toni Morrison capture something of the intensity with which the question of language was being debated in English-language publications in the 1980’s, and both passages were published soon after Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s seminal Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, which had appeared in 1986. But already in his 1948 ‘Orphée Noir’ Jean-Paul Sartre was reflecting and synthesizing the creative deformations of French that were being explored by poets of the negritude movement, many of whom were personal acquaintances of Morisseau-Leroy. But Haiti has a particularly early claim to this thread of anti-colonial thought. Indeed, the idea that was central to Morisseau-Leroy’s career and which is at the center of this chapter, namely Haiti’s need for a uniquely Creole literature, can be DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-9

136  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer sensed already in the Declaration of Independence. Although this document was itself composed in French, Dessalines, backed by a phalanx of co-signatory secretaries and generals, concludes the main section of the text with the statement that henceforth anything French would be considered anathema (anathême, Gaffield 2016, 244).3 Morisseau-Leroy seems to have taken Dessalines’ message to heart as he transitions from his early concern for the question of language witnessed in Récolte toward a half-century of actively promoting and championing the growth of a Creole literature. After the turn of the century experimentations with Creole described in the previous section, the U.S. occupation had set back the development of Creole literature, and the anti-Vodou campaign of the early 1940’s presented another challenge to embracing the verbal and spiritual norms of most Haitians.4 Morisseau-Leroy’s novel was published between Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew, 1944), the dialogue portions of which were composed in French inflected toward Creole, and Sartre’s Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus, 1948), which praised the early poets of the Francophone négritude movement for their creative deformations of French that, according to Sartre, asserted the authors’ independence from the strict proprieties of the colonial language. But strong calls, such as that made by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986), for colonized authors to publish in their native languages (as Ngũgĩ has done in Gikuyu) had not yet been raised. And so Morisseau-Leroy’s decision to begin composing in Creole, rather than in French, stands as a radical move in the history of Haitian and Caribbean (and, indeed, all colonized) literatures. Reflecting back on this period of his life, Morisseau-Leroy described the choice between French and Creole as a continuation of Haiti’s revolutionary history: ‘The real problem is whether one wants to emulate Placide, Toussaint’s son, who joined the French army and fought against his father, or Isaac, his son-in-law, who fought at his side’ (1983, 19).5 In 1953 Morisseau-Leroy published his first two efforts in following the path of Isaac Louverture. His Diacoute offered the first collection of original Creole poems, including ‘Mèsi, Desalin’ or ‘Thank you, Dessalines’, which remains one of his best known works.6 And his adaptation of the Sophoclean story of Antigone debuted at the Rex Theatre in Port-au-Prince before appearing in print and playing in venues across Haiti, Paris, West Africa, Jamaica and the U.S.7 Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn is my main focus in this section, but it has both important theatrical antecedents, which I will discuss briefly here, and important legacies that I will treat in subsequent chapters. In an interview in 1992, Morisseau-Leroy outlined a brief history of Creole theater in Haiti and Saint-Domingue and mentioned ‘a French man named Grosclément who was very much interested in putting Creole plays on stage’ (1992, 667). He notes Grosclément’s efforts to promote theater generally and also that slaves were allowed to perform on stage in the colonial era. These are quick and passing comments, and Morisseau-Leroy may be referring specifically to an unusual play that enjoyed great success in the second half of the eighteenth century. Composed in 1758 and performed many times over the coming decades across Saint-Domingue, Jeannot et Thérèse is a parody

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  137 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le devin du village (The Village Seer), a one-act opera first performed at Fontainebleau in 1752. This light melodrama about two lovers who separate but eventually reunite was adapted to the racial politics of Saint-Domingue by Le Gros Clément, whom Fouchard believes to have been Claude Clément (1955, 285). In this adaptation of Rousseau’s operetta, the titular couple were both black, their dialogue was composed in Creole (or a version of Creole that was intelligible to the Francophone audiences), and while the lovers are separated the beautiful Thérèse is courted by suitors of every racialized skin-tone in the colony. In most cases the performance concluded with a pas nègre or ‘slave dance,’ and MorisseauLeroy may have had these dark-skinned characters in mind when he mentions slave performers in Saint-Domingue. But Julia Prest, who offers the most recent and updated discussion of these matters, concludes that such roles ‘were all performed by white performers, sometimes in blackface’ (2019, 511).8 Jeannot et Thérèse also included a scene of Vodou, or pseudo-Vodou, ritual, which is otherwise unattested in theatrical performances in Saint-Domingue, and this scene may have influenced Morisseau-Leroy’s own (more authentic) staging of Vodou ritual in his Antigòn (ibid, 514–15). Morisseau-Leroy also mentions plays in Creole that were staged during the U.S. occupation (1915–1934), which coincided with his formative years, but none of these has survived. This disappearance of early twentieth-century Creole theater scripts left a deep impression on Morisseau-Leroy, since it spoke to the variable relationship between theatrical performance and published literature. As he planned his Haitian version of Antigone, therefore, he wanted to bring together theater’s ability to speak to large audiences, both those who could and could not read, and literature’s ability to preserve a theatrical script. This is what Sophocles and Jean Anouilh had achieved with their versions of Antigone’s story, but such a combination of theatrical and literary success was no simple task. As with the vast majority of ancient theater, Euripides’ handling of Antigone, for example, has not survived (though the general plot contours are known from later ancient comments about it), nor did Franck Fouché’s treatment of Oedipus (1953) or Morisseau-Leroy’s version of Anouilh’s Medée (1956), both of which were staged in Creole in Haiti.9 And so, in something of a replay of Price-Mars’ attacks on Haitian ‘collective Bovaryism’, Morisseau-Leroy’s ‘Antigòn en créole (1953) was written as a polemic responding to Francophile Haitian intellectuals who had convinced themselves that abstract thought and sophisticated dramatic action could not be rendered in Creole’.10 Like Sylvain, Morisseau-Leroy turned to a text of the European literary canon in order demonstrate the expressive power of Creole, but in four important ways he moved beyond Sylvain’s Cric? Crac! First, Sylvain had chosen to engage a text from France, the colonial power that had stood in the way of Haitian independence and which crippled Haiti’s economic prospects via the indemnity of 1825, whereas Morisseau-Leroy turned to ancient Greece, perhaps asserting a direct relationship with Greco-Roman culture that did not require the intermediation of European colonial powers. With typical humor, Morisseau-Leroy even suggested that someday

138  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer ‘some industrious Greek may put it back into Greek from the original Creole’.11 Second, whereas Sylvain had published a bi-lingual adaptation of La Fontaine that was fit for the Francophile elite, Morisseau-Leroy composed his Antigòn completely in Creole, since his two primary audiences were the Creole speaking majority inside Haiti and the literary world outside Haiti (where he supported translations of his play into English and French).12 Third, his cast of characters operate within a Vodou context, without any hint of Christian influence or denigration of Vodou – two issues prominent in Sylvain’s prologue. And fourth, after the success of Antigòn in Haiti and abroad, Morisseau-Leroy went on to compose an extension of the traditional plot, and his Wa Kreyon (King Creon, discussed in Chapter 7) uses Sophoclean characters to present a purely original critique of the Duvalier regime. In these ways, Morisseau-Leroy’s work represents a turning point in the history of Creole literature, and his achievements both answer the call of Price-Mars and contrast with the limited role of Creole in Hibbert and Sylvain. Morisseau-Leroy’s legacy in this vein has been furthered by various authors, especially Frankétienne, whose Dezafi (Cock Fight, 1975) is the first novel composed in Creole. Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn follows the Sophoclean tale only in broad outline. Wa Kreyon (King Creon) is the ruler of a Haitian town called Tèb (Thebes), which has recently been torn by civil strife as the sons of the late Wa Edip (King Oedipus) vied for power. In that struggle, the two sons, Eteyoklès (Eteocles) and Polinis (Polyneices), killed each other, and the throne has passed to Kreyon, Edip’s brother-in-law. To bring order to the civic chaos, Kreyon has forbidden the burial of Polinis, since he had led a faction of outsiders against the city and was, therefore, a traitor. Antigòn, the sister of the dead warriors, who is engaged to Kreyon’s son Emon (Haemon), transgresses Kreyon’s order and buries Polinis. And Izmèn (Ismene), the fourth childsibling of Edip, attempts to find a safe middle-ground between her uncle’s order and Antigòn’s insistence on caring for the corpse of Polinis. After confrontations involving all these central characters, Kreyon punishes Antigòn, and in so doing, he loses not only his niece but also his son Emon and his wife, Eredis (Eurydice). At this level, Morisseau-Leroy’s play is in line with those of Sophocles, Anouilh and many others who have adapted this myth, but there the similarities end. Whereas Sophocles’ play begins with a conspiratorial conversation between Antigone and Ismene about the need to bury Polyneices and Anouilh’s version opens with a richly descriptive introduction by a chorus, Morisseau-Leroy begins his prologue ‘recited by three masked actresses to the rhythm of a Yanvalou dance belonging to the Vodou rites of Rada’.13 This trio delivers a quick overview that carefully balances the figures of Kreyon and Antigòn before setting out the playwright’s wider ambitions for his retelling of the story. These opening lines deserve particularly close reading. The first line tells the audience that this is a very old story (1997, 7): Se yon istwa yo te rakonte depi lontan, lontan, ‘This is a story that was told a long, long time ago’.14 The next several set out the names of the key characters, their family relationships, including the unwitting Oedipal incest, the attendant family curse, and the fact that Polinis and Eteyoklès have just died in civil strife. Then the characterization of Kreyon and Antigòn begins.

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  139 Wa Kreyon di pa pou antere Polinis ki te kont li. Tout moun ba l konsèy pa fè sa. Li pap tande yo. Antigòn di se pou l antere frè l Polinis. Tout moun ba l konsèy pa fè sa Wa Kreyon defann fè. Li pap koute yo. Wa Kreyon gan rezon l pou l pa antere Polinis. Antigòn gan rezon l pou l okipe kadav frè l. Anyen pa kapab fe yo chanje. King Kreyon says not bury Polinis, who was against him. Everyone advised him not to. He will not hear them. Antigòn says that she will bury her brother Polinis. Everyone advised her not to do what King Kreyon had forbidden. She will not listen to them. King Kreyon has his reasons for not burying Polinis. Antigòn has her reasons for taking care of her brother’s dead body. Nothing can make them change. The poetic economy here stresses the parallels between the two main characters. Morisseau-Leroy devotes three lines in alternation to Kreyon and Antigòn followed by single lines for each. The first line within each triad starts with the character’s name and describes what each says. The second line offers the negative communal response to each character’s plan, and the lines are identical (Tout moun ba l konsèy pa fè sa, ‘everyone advised him/her not to’) except that the line about Antigòn is extended. And the third line predicts the character’s refusal to heed this communal warning, again with nearly identical phrasing (Li pap tande/koute yo, ‘He/She will not hear/listen to them’). This tightly parallel structure is facilitated by Creole’s gender-flexible pronoun li (or l’), ‘him/her’ and ‘he/she’. The next two lines repeat this close parallelism as we hear that Kreyon and Antigòn each gan rezon l pou . . . , ‘has his/her reasons for . . .’, doing what they do. This section concludes with the inevitability of the plot’s crisis, since Anyen pa kapab fe yo chanje, ‘nothing can make them change’, a sentiment reminiscent of Anouilh’s chorus. The story of Antigone has often been told in modern times in order to valorize opposition to governmental abuses. Although ancient Greek tragedy regularly avoided simplistic good-guy vs bad-guy narratives, Athol Fugard’s 1973 The Island, which harnesses the story of Antigone to a blistering attack on South African apartheid, has fostered the idea that the myth’s central issue is ‘standing up and being counted in a situation that involved oppression and injustice’.15 Closer to Morisseau-Leroy’s time and linguistic context, Anouilh’s Antigone had debuted in Nazi occupied Paris in 1944 and the close governmental oversight of the arts ensured that Anouilh could not be so overt in linking the figure of Creon to contemporary realities, even if he had wished to do so. Morisseau-Leroy’s case, however, initially seems to reactivate the vitality of the agon or a balanced rhetorical contest

140  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer that was central to so many Athenian tragedies. As easy as it may be for many modern viewers to sympathize with Antigone’s devotion to her brother and resistance to Creon’s authority, the Haitian Kreyon has his reasons (gan rezon l) and the Haitian Antigòn takes action that flies in the face of popular opinion (tout moun ba l konsèy pa fè sa). To be sure, the play soon undermines Kreyon’s position, and the king ultimately precipitates a catastrophe that destroys his family, but he and Antigòn both begin the narrative with some justification and have the opportunity (if not the will) to change course before tragedy envelopes everyone.16 The rest of the prologue sets out Morisseau-Leroy’s vision for adapting Antigone to a Haitian context (1997, 8–9): Se yon kont yo te tire depi lontan, lontan. Yo tire l deja nan tout peyi. Yo mete l deja nan tout lang. M di kite m wè si m pa ta mete l an kreyòl tou. M pran tou sa m te kapab pran ladan l jan yo te rakonte l lontan, lontan . . . Epi, m mete ladan l solèy d Ayiti, m mete ladan l yon jan yon mannyè, pèp d Ayiti genyen pou l konprann lavi ak lanmò, kouray ak lapenn, chans ak devenn. M mete ladan l lèsen, lèmò, mistè, lespri ki gade gran chimen, simityè, baryè, pyebwa, jaden, lanmè, larivyè, ki koumande lapli, van, loray, ann Ayiti, e ki byen sanble ak sa mesye a yo rele dye grèk la yo. Antigòn pral antere Polinis kou sa ta pase ann Ayiti. Wa Kreyon pral touye Antigòn kou yon gran nèg Ayisyen konn regle yon zafè kon sa. Epi, m ap kite Antigòn, Izmèn, Marenn, Wa Kreyon, Tirezyas, Emon, Filo di tout pawòl Ayisyen ta di nan yon ka parèy. M pa reskonsab sa yo fè . . . M kou nou tout la a. M prale rete gade yo. M prale chita tande yo. Men Antigòn nou an. This is a folktale they used to tell a long, long time ago. They had already told it in every country.

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  141 They had already translated it into every language. I said, let me see if I can translate it into Creole too. I took everything I could take from it – the same as they told it long, long ago . . . And I put into it the Haitian Sun, I put into it the style and manner the Haitian people have of understanding life and death, courage and sorrow, chance and woe. I put into it the saints, the dead, and the mysteries, the spirits who protect the highway, cemeteries, fences, trees, fields, seas, rivers, the spirits who command the rain, wind, and thunder in Haiti, which seem close to what the author called the Greek gods. Antigòn will bury Polinis, just as might happen in Haiti. King Kreyon will kill Antigòn, just as a rich man in Haiti might do in such a case. And I will let Antigòn, Izmèn, Marenn [the girls’ godmother], King Kreyon, Tirezyas, Emon, Filo [Kreyon’s attendant] say everything a Haitian would say in a similar case. I am not responsible for what they do . . . I am like all of you present here. I will stay and watch them. I am going to sit down and listen to them. Here is our Antigòn. These lines are remarkable in many ways, and they offer the clearest insight into Morisseau-Leroy’s strategy for adapting his material. He begins with the universality of the myth of Antigone, presenting Haiti and Creole as the only country and language not to have adapted the myth. This is, of course, an exaggeration, but the story of Antigone is among the most frequently adapted tales across the globe.17 The next lines spotlight Morisseau-Leroy himself as the subjective figure who recognized and sought to fill this gap in the world record. Just as Kreyon and Antigòn had been characterized a few lines earlier in terms of their speech, so too does MorisseauLeroy speak/write of himself as speaking this play into existence (Wa Kreyon di . . . Antigòn di . . . M di . . . , ‘King Kreyon says . . . Antigòn says . . . I said . . .).18 This power of the spoken word runs through the prologue and into the action of the play, since the first line after the prologue is Antigòn’s emphatic Mwen di w non (‘I tell you no!’, 11). Moira Fradinger leans into the importance of Antigòn’s No! in order to present her as a manifestation of Dessalines, the Revolutionary figure who most adamantly said No! to French influence, the hero who lives on as a Vodou lwa and whom Morisseau-Leroy upholds as the man who taught Haiti to say No! (in his poem ‘Mesi, Desalin’, ‘Thank you, Dessalines’).19 I would like to expand Fradinger’s point by adding that not only does Antigòn embody Dessalines’ No! but Morisseau-Leroy himself does so as well. He inserts

142  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer himself into this cast of bold-speaking characters, blurring boundaries between perdurative heroic figures, who shape their world, and the temporally and culturally specific figure of the playwright, who champions the Creole of the Haitian majority against the French of the minority elite. Just as Kreyon speaks his starkly controversial edict and Antigòn speaks her defiance, Morisseau-Leroy speaks in Creole and on behalf of Creole by bringing this tale known across the globe into a uniquely Haitian idiom. That Haitian idiom emerges from Creole itself, and it is first instantiated through the image of the sun. Not only an image of Caribbean warmth and beauty, the sun is associated with the Vodou lwa (‘spirit’) Legba, the figure who mediates between the spirit world and humanity and, for that reason, the lwa with whom most prayers and rituals begin. As such, the sun is the fitting starting place for making Antigone Haitian.20 Just as Legba, represented by the sun, mediates between the lwa and humans, Morisseau-Leroy plays a Legba-like role by serving as the intermediary between the myth of Antigone, his audience, and the Haitian mannyè, ‘way’, of understanding the world. Through this mannyè he introduces lèsen, lèmò, mistè, lespri, ‘the saints, the dead, the mysteries, the spirits’, or, to put it simply, Vodou. These words, and the narrative that follows, represent the culmination of a long history that moved slowly toward a presentation of Vodou in literature that was neither derogatory nor trivializing. Sylvain, Hibbert and others had begun to discuss Vodou and to engage with Creole, but their important efforts, revolutionary in their own right, only went so far, and Sylvain’s sustained Creole composition was framed in terms of a prologue that valorized Christianity at the expense of Vodou. Price-Mars represents a more academic and analytic tradition of acknowledging the cultural value of Creole and Vodou, but he wrote in French and spoke from the perspective of and to the elite who needed to change their ways. Morisseau-Leroy, despite his personal atheism, recognized not only that Creole and Vodou were historically and conceptually linked but also that he could facilitate contact between the Creole-Vodou idiom of most Haitians and the wider world. Thus, his Antigòn serves as a portal that simultaneously brings the Greek mythical narrative to the Haitian majority and introduces the rest of the world to Haitian Creole and Vodou. In Chapter 2, I suggested that one explanation for Bergeaud’s framing of Stella in terms of Greco-Roman mythology and his complete silence about the role of Vodou in Haiti (especially the absence of the 1791 Bois Caïman ceremony from his narrative) could be found in the parallels between the crowded spiritual pantheons of Vodou and the ancient Greco-Roman worlds. If he had wanted to signal his awareness of (or, perhaps, even a tacit support for) Vodou culture or to suggest to his Francophone audience a critical evaluation of the connection between the Vodou lwa and Christian saints, then his retelling of the history of the Haitian Revolution in terms of the twin sons of Ares, Apolline prophecy and Athena’s concern for mortal heroes makes sense. Bergeaud may or may not have intended Greco-Roman mythology to work in this way in Stella, but his readers are nonetheless free to consider such an interpretive lens. More analytic writers who preceded Morisseau-Leroy were often far more overt in making this comparison, which has the obvious rhetorical advantage of

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  143 facilitating an understanding of Vodou outside Haiti by comparing its spiritual powers to the more widely studied mythology of ancient Greece. For example, in 1918, the Haitian-American doctor and esoteric Arthur C. Holly (who sometimes used the sobriquet Her-Ra-Ma-ëL) wrote that ‘These souls, divinized (or canonized) by death, this is what the Greeks called a daimon or hero and what the Latins mark out under the names Lares, Manes, Genie.’21 This same passage was quoted by the Haitian ethnologist and historian of religion Milo Rigaud in his La Tradition Voudoo et le Voudoo Haïtien, which was published in the same year that Morisseau-Leroy staged his Antigòn.22 But if earlier authors laid the groundwork for a covert connection between Greek and Haitian mythologies and if academics and popularizers had used such a connection to construct analogies for rendering the Vodou pantheon knowable to the wider world, Morisseau-Leroy is at least as artful as Bergeaud and as explicit as the more analytic writers. To facilitate a reciprocal dialogue between Haiti and ancient Greece, he enumerates the areas over which the Vodou spirits exert control and then likens these lwa to the Greek gods. Bondye, the supreme God of the Vodou cosmos, exists at such a remove from human concerns that it is the lwa who take interest in human affairs and oversee the dynamic forces that shape the Haitian landscape. This similarity between the Greek gods and Haitian lwa leads to further comparisons, and in a vein that recalls Price-Mars’ analysis of the quotidian realities of the Haitian countryside and the ancient Mediterranean, Morisseau-Leroy presents the roles of both Kreyon and Antigòn as thoroughly typical, rather than exceptional. The story of Antigone is ancient but not outdated, and the prologue imagines a new Tèb that parallels ancient Greek Thebes. This detail about a new Thebes in Haiti is richly productive, since Thebes is a city that continually reproduces itself. Euripides’ Bacchae, for example, contains a scene in which Pentheus, the second king of Thebes and an ancestor of the family of Oedipus, saw two Thebes when he was under the disorienting power of the god Dionysus. Pentheus’ double-vision is repeated (explicitly or without overt expression) whenever the myth of Dionysus’ return to Thebes is reconceptualized, as with Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, which debuted at the British Royal National Theatre in 1973. Another doubling of Thebes can be found already in Homer, who knows of both the Greek city of that name, which was the birthplace of Oedipus, and an Egyptian Thebes. The Egyptian city was never called Thebes in the Egyptian language (it was most often called Waset, though it had other names across its long history), and so the homonymous relationship exists only within the Greek verbal ecology. Homer differentiated the two Thebes by their descriptive epithets, calling the Greek city ‘seven-gated’ and the Egyptian city ‘hundred-gated’. More than a decade after Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn, the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem (1936–2015) put heavy emphasis on this confusion of names in his The Comedy of Oedipus: You’re the One Who Killed the Beast (1969), which is set in a Thebes that is topographically Egyptian but also partially Greek through the mythical narrative, but Morisseau-Leroy is already up to something similar by suggesting that a Haitian Tèb might as well exist, and that were it to do so, it would have a Kreyon and an Antigòn, characterized by their equally stubborn

144  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer verbal tendencies toward authoritarianism and resistance. In this way, MorisseauLeroy ensures that his audience appreciates the antiquity of the story without ever letting the influence of Sophocles lead to an ‘incipient orphanization’ of the Haitian Antigòn.23 The Greek story is not the model but, rather, an early example of the universality of Antigone’s tale. The prologue concludes with a series of first-person statements that, perhaps paradoxically, allow the narrating voice to dissolve into the group. As MorisseauLeroy and the trio of speaking performers disavow any responsibility for what is about to happen (I am not responsible . . .), he/they underline the autonomy of his characters – both in terms of their vivid existence on stage and their responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This disavowal lets the narrating voice assert that it is just like everyone else assembled in the theater (I am like all of you), and the voice then becomes part of the audience and falls silent (I will stay and watch . . . I am going to sit down and listen). The liminal figure of the author-playwrightnarrator has absorbed himself into the collectivity of the community in manner that speaks to Morisseau-Leroy’s ambitions for a truly populist theatrical art. After the prologue, the curtain rises on a scene set in front of Kreyon’s peristil, the sacred space of a Vodou temple. The perestil, a word derived from the French péristyle and ultimately from the Greek peristylon, ‘the colonnade around a temple’, typically has a roof held up by the potomitan or ‘central pillar’, which is particularly connected to the figure of Legba and which is sometimes described as a form of the World Tree. The peristil is where many Vodou rituals are conducted, and thus the visual space of Antigòn immediately creates a sacred and specifically Vodou space in which the action of the play will unfold. Just as the Haitian lwa parallel the Greek gods, so too does the sacred space of this peristil parallel the sacred setting of ancient Greek drama as part of the annual celebration of Dionysus. Antigòn speaks the first line of dialogue with her emphatic No!, which is balanced by the concluding line of the play, in which Filo, Kreyon’s loyal advisor, speaks a submissive ‘yes, King Kreyon’ (Wi, Wa Kreyon, 41).24 The opening action contrasts Antigòn’s determination to bury her brother and Izmèn’s equivocation, as she wants to join Antigòn in caring for their brother’s corpse but does not want to transgress Kreyon’s edict. In the Greek play, this conversation between the sisters is followed by the choral entrance song, which provides more detail about the battle in which the brothers had killed each other. In Morisseau-Leroy’s version, this choral power to provide information drawn from other times and places and to offer insights into characters or events is fulfilled by Vodou ritual. Marenn, whose name means ‘godmother’ and who is the girls’ beloved attendant, is also a mambo or Vodou priestess, and at Izmèn’s request (and in secret from Kreyon), she brings out an ason and kannari and calls upon Legba. The ason is a sacred rattle with a bell in it and the kannari is a clay jar in which a lwa can reside and from which the spirit can speak. Both are standard implements in Vodou, and Marenn shakes the ason to summon Legba, whose voice emerges from the kannari. Legba’s speech is in line with the prologue in telling Marenn and Izmèn that he can do nothing to change what is to come. Kreyon ought to soften his stance, but he won’t. And so Antigòn, though living and breathing, is already dead (Men li mouri

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  145 deja wi, 14), a comment that prefigures Kreyon’s later claims that she will end up as a zonbi. As Legba reiterates the central crux of the play, his words again draw tight parallels between Antigòn and Kreyon, saying that neither will listen. When Izmèn hears Kreyon coming, she and Marenn hastily exit, and Kreyon enters with Tirezyas, Kreyon’s ongan (houngan) or priest, who parallels the role of the Greek seer Tiresias.25 Tirezyas, who claims that he has been given mystical vision from Bondye (the supreme God of the Vodou cosmos), tells Kreyon that he is compelled to warn the king of the need to bury Polinis’ body. This reiteration of Legba’s warning about Kreyon’s edict infuriates the king, who, on seeing the ason and kannari on the table, orders Tirezyas to contact the lwa. Tirezyas repeats Marenn’s ritual and invites Èzili Freda to be present. Èzili (Erzulie), related to the Yoruba orisha Oshun, is a powerful female spirit, who can manifest in many forms. Èzili Freda is a specifically Rada manifestation of Èzili, who is the embodiment of feminine beauty and love.26 She repeats Legba’s warnings about Kreyon’s perilous situation, and as she addresses the king, she offers key insight into MorisseauLeroy’s conception of the lwa as specifically human constructs. This can be heard clearly when Kreyon responds to her warnings by asking what he can do, since Polinis was an enemy of the state and to honor him would be politically disastrous. Rather than providing a solution or superhuman wisdom in the style of a deus ex machina, Èzili essentially affirms that there are no good options for Kreyon, and she departs after saying that he must figure this out on his own. Rather than guiding human action (as the gods of Greek and Roman mythology often do), the lwa, as Morisseau-Leroy presents them, leave the critical decisions to the humans, who are free to chart their own course. Perhaps spurred by the fact that Èzili offered no useful advice, Kreyon doubles down on his original edict and his (in itself laudable) idea that the country needs consistent messaging from its leaders. With wonderful dramatic economy, Kreyon sends off a larger detachment of guards to watch over the corpse of Polinis, and after only a brief interlude, Kreyon’s henchman Filo rushes back onstage with the news that the corpse has already been buried. Just when Kreyon thought that he was solidifying control of the situation, the tragic narrative begins to unravel. Filo describes a miraculous scene in which torrential rain is falling everywhere except on Antigòn, and the lone girl buries Polinis with the help of ‘a throng of arms without bodies’ (yon bann bra san kò, 22). When Kreyon hears this report, he tries various ways of explaining it away, each of which are rejected by Antigòn herself. He suspects that Filo is crazy, that she is a ‘spirit’ (dyab, 23) or that Antigòn had not heard of his edict or is, herself, crazy (24).27 After rejecting all his blustering attempts to make sense of this violation of his order, Antigòn demonstrates that she understands the mechanics of this insoluble situation far better than Kreyon does when she says ‘I buried Polinis. That’s all. You may kill me’ (25). Whereas Kreyon still hopes to find a way out of this conundrum that does not precipitate dire consequences, Antigòn has accepted that no such option exists. Thus constrained, she chooses to bury her brother in the full understanding that this will lead to her own death. Unlike the king, Antigòn makes a clear-headed choice and commits herself to an action and its anticipated consequences. At the furthest remove from

146  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer the specifics of the plot, this difference between Antigòn and Kreyon encapsulates their different positions within the dynamics of tragedy. Antigòn accepts that no compromise is possible between her desire to bury her brother and Kreyon’s edict forbidding such a burial. In contrast to this, Kreyon refuses to admit such an impasse as he insists on the validity of his own authority. Kreyon orders Filo to lock up Antigòn and Izmèn, who now wants to share her sister’s fate, though she did not participate in the burial of Polinis. Kreyon next speaks with his son Emon, Antigòn’s fiancé and cousin. Whereas Sophocles had Haemon shape his words primarily in terms of a son wanting to advise his kingly father and help him avoid making a terrible mistake, Morisseau-Leroy’s Emon begins by asking if he is addressing his father or the king. He wants to appeal to his father and to his father’s role as a paternal figure to Antigòn (both because he is the uncle to the fatherless girl and because he is slated to become her father-in-law), and clearly sees Kreyon, in his capacity as king, as less amenable to this message. Kreyon sounds as if he, too, wants to disentangle his personal and official roles, but this soon proves untenable as he accuses Antigòn of preferring their enemies by virtue of her burial of Polinis and thus using the language of state politics in an effort to explain Antigòn’s actions. One of the cruxes of the story of Antigone is the impossibility of perfectly fulfilling familial and state duties when those two categories have become intermingled, and Emon soon leaves Kreyon saying that his father has been abandoned by God, the saints and the dead (Bondye, lèsen, lèmo, 30). After Emon exits to find Antigòn, Kreyon holds the stage alone, and MorisseauLeroy has the king enact a scene that represents both a close counter-reading of the Greek tale and a uniquely Haitian innovation: Kreyon kills Antigòn via Vodou powers and attempts to turn her into a zonbi. Fuming with anger at what he perceives to be his son’s betrayal, Kreyon focuses his rage on Antigòn (31): Li pral cheche Antigòn? Se zonbi Antigòn l a kontre. Se kadav Antigòn l a kenbe men. Lò l ap konprann l ap pale ak Antigòn, se ak zonbi Antigòn la val fè kontwòlè sa a. Will he go looking for Antigòn? He will find her zonbi. He will hold the hand of Antigòn’s corpse. When he thinks he is talking with Antigòn, he will be talking with Antigòn’s zonbi. Kreyon then follows a different ritual pattern from that carried out by Marenn and Tirezyas. He takes a glass of water and a knife and invokes three divine powers. First, he asks Bondye for permission to call Sekle-Kite, a lwa with power over the dead; next he instructs Sekle-Kite to find Antigòn and bring her soul into the glass of water so that he can stab it; and finally, he invokes the power of Grann Brijit, ‘the mother of all the dead’, as he stabs Antigòn’s soul.28 As he stabs her soul, which has been brought into the glass of water, he asserts power over it and denounces her as a criminal, a worker of evil and the seducer of his son’s mind. The water in the glass turns blood red just as Tirezyas returns to the stage. Before we witness Tirezyas’ reaction, this dramatic moment can be better appreciated by examining it in terms of both the Sophoclean handling of Antigone’s

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  147 death and the Vodou conceptualization of the zonbi. In the Greek Antigone, Tiresias delivers a forceful condemnation of Creon’s position and finally shakes the king’s confidence by hinting that Haemon will soon die. The seer exits, and Creon has a brief exchange with the Chorus, through which he accepts their communal wisdom that he must relent, and he rushes off stage in hopes of reaching Antigone in time to save her and his son. One of the great tragedies of Sophocles’ play is that Creon’s realization comes moments too late, and a Messenger comes on stage to deliver the heart-wrenching account of Creon arriving just in time to see his son die on top of the corpse of Antigone. As Tiresias chastises Creon, the seer succinctly articulates one of the themes of the play, namely the contrast between a corpse that remains unburied and Antigone’s imprisonment in a cave. ‘You are burying someone who belongs above, dishonorably placing a living soul in the grave, while you keep a corpse here away from the infernal gods, unmourned, unburied, unholy.’29 Both bodies are in the wrong place. The living body of Antigone has been treated like a corpse, while the corpse of Polyneices remains above ground among the living. This situation speaks to the high value ancient Greek society placed on offering appropriate burial, an issue already highlighted in the Homeric poems, especially through the figure of Elpenor, one of Odysseus’ crew who dies and is left unburied until his wandering soul meets Odysseus in the land of the dead and begs for a proper burial. Morisseau-Leroy reworks this contrast between the unburied corpse and the living soul in a tomb by invoking the figure of the zonbi (zombi). Unlike the Hollywood presentation of the zombie as a slathering monster that wants only to devour the living, the zonbi of the Vodou world is a creature that is controlled by a bokor (bokò, ‘sorcerer’).30 Soon after Morisseau-Leroy debuted his Antigòn, as the Duvalier regime took firm hold of the country, Haitian authors began to use the figure of the zonbi as cipher for political resistance, as in Frankétienne’s Dézafi (Cockfight, 1975) and René Depestre’s Le mât de Cocagne (The Festival of the Greasy Pole, 1979), in which entire towns fall under the spell of a bokor. This role for the zonbi as a reaction to Duvalierism had not yet emerged in 1953 (Duvalier would be elected president in 1957), and the idea of Antigòn as a zonbi can be more tightly connected with Jason Allen-Paisant’s argument that theatrical portrayals of Vodou scenes in this era participate in a trend of engaging ‘the sacred as a means of survival’ (2021, 70) in the aftermath of the traumatizing U.S. occupation of Haiti.31 Even so, it would be helpful to have a sharper sense of how, exactly, we should imagine a zombified Antigòn. The origins of the zonbi are shadowy, but they certainly are connected to West African traditions and the traumas of the colonial slave economy of SaintDomingue.32 Laënec Hurbon has articulated a useful distinction, which I  follow here, between two categories of zonbi, one that is a soul without a body and another that is a body without a soul. All commentators also understand the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) as an inflection point in the conceptualization of the zonbi, and Lauren Derby (2015) has made the case that Hurbon’s second category, the zonbi as soulless body, may have come to prominence as a reaction

148  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer to the occupation. In one of the earliest descriptions, Moreau de Saint-Méry, a supporter of the slave systems of the French Caribbean and an early literary witness to Vodou rituals, mentions terror-inducing zonbis together with the belief in loupgarous (‘werewolves’) and ghosts, and he glosses zonbi (which he writes Zombi) as a Creole word meaning esprit, revenant, (‘spirit, returned-soul,’ 1797, 52). This disembodied version of the zonbi persists alongside those accounts that describe the corporeal zonbi, as Hurbon has shown in detail (1988, 194–214). He describes a thriving market for disembodied zonbis, whose souls a bokor traps in jars or bottles for later sale and use in various capacities (such as attracting clients or helping a student with exams). By contrast, the corporeal zonbi exists in a lethargic or neardeath state or has been stolen from a cemetery by a bokor in order to make it work endlessly in the cane fields or other such labor. Both versions of the zonbi appear in 20th century Haitian literature prior to Morisseau-Leroy’s play. The earliest example that I have found is in Zoune chez sa ninnaine: Fan’m gain sept sauts pou li passé (‘Zoune at her Godmother’s: Women Have Seven Trials to endure’), a 1906 French lodyans with a Creole subtitle by Justin Lhérisson (1873–1907) – another text that brings limited amounts of Creole to a French readership.33 The main character is a sickly girl whose parents suspect that her condition is caused by zombis, des cochons sans poil qui, à l’aide d’un invisible calumet, suçaient à distance le sang de leur fille (‘zonbis, from “the hairless pigs” that, with the help of an invisible pipe, suck their daughter’s blood at a distance’).34 Such shape-shifting spirits may also inform a riddling bit of Creole in Jacques Roumain’s 1931 novel La montagne ensorcelée, in which an eccentric character named Désilus mutters Maringouins ping’ga zombis zanzamzam, zim, zim, zim-zim, which Roumain renders in a footnote as Maringouins prenez garde aux revenants (‘Mosquitoes look out for the zonbis’, 2004, 11).35 Ida Faubert (1882–1969), daughter of President Lysias Salomon and among the earliest female authors from Haiti, describes something closer to Hurbon’s corporeal zonbi in her 1959 short story ‘Une étrange histoire’ (‘A Strange Tale’), in which a bokor turns a ten year old girl named Mina into a zonbi in order to bind her to him for his sexual pleasure. The local community, including the doctor, believes that the girl has died, but she is actually in thrall to the bokor, until he suffers a deadly fall and the few people who know the whole story smuggle Mina to a convent in Paris where she can live in safety. We see her ten years after her zombification, when she should be twenty years old: ‘A young woman? No. A strange form of a woman. A livid, ravaged face hardened by a white headdress, her sunken eyes lifeless, that mouth with a frightening grin, and that walk, the walk of an automaton – could all this belong to a living being? The girl of twenty had no age’ (Faubert 2014, 45). In a devastating metaphor for the trauma of sexual violence, Mina can never escape the effects of her zombification even though the bokor has died. Mina’s body continues to exist, but her lifeforce is gone forever. Such a narrative stands in contrast to the reversibility of zombification in anti-Duvalier novels, such as Frankétienne’s Dezafi and Depestre’s Le mât de Cocagne, in which the freeing or healing of the zonbi (by giving it salt) is critical to the political message.

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  149 Returning to Morisseau-Leroy’s play, his invocation of the zonbi mixes Hurbon’s two categories. Kreyon calls Antigòn’s soul into a vessel, just as a bokor harvests disembodied zonbis, but the king specifically envisions Emon interacting with Antigòn’s body as though she were a corporeal zonbi under his control. Yet Kreyon expresses no plans to use either Antigòn’s soul or her body, and so whereas the mechanics of zombification draw on both of Hurbon’s two categories, Kreyon’s intentions combine political domination and personal malice. He aims to turn Antigòn into a zonbi in order to bring stability to his regime by silencing and controlling her obstreperous No! in a manner that parallels his attempt to control the corpse of his fallen enemy Polinis. As Kreyon stabs the glass of water that now contains the soul of Antigòn, Tirezyas returns to the stage and immediately understands the horror of what the king has done. Kreyon claims that he is in control of the situation, because he believes that the blood-stained water is proof that the lwa are supporting him. The ongan responds by saying: Yo pa ak ou. Se paske yo pa ak ou ki fè yo pèmèt ou fè sa w ap fè la a, ‘They are not with you. It is because they are not with you that they allow you to do what you are doing here’ (31). Again, Morisseau-Leroy stresses the idea that the lwa are not independent superhuman forces that steer the course of history and ensure that the king makes the best decisions. They are, rather, projections of human choices and values, and although Kreyon had begun the play with a valid position of refusing to honor a fallen enemy with proper burial, popular sentiment in Tèb has now turned against him and the spiritual world has followed suit. Having already accused Filo, Tirezyas and Antigòn of being crazy, Kreyon claims that even the lwa themselves have gone mad, and instructs Tirezyas to contact Danmbala (Damballa), a powerful sky spirit embodied as a massive white serpent. Tirezyas tries, but Danmbala refuses to come because, as the ongan declares, Danmbala is Antigòn’s tutelary lwa. As Kreyon becomes increasingly frantic, the voice of Èzili Freda is heard again when the lwa takes possession of Marenn just as she steps onstage. After hearing two lwa (Legba and Èzili in her first appearance) speak from the kannari, Èzili now briefly ‘mounts’ Marenn, who serves as her ‘horse’. Èzili warns that Emon is on the verge of death, and she supersedes Kreyon’s authority both by ordering Filo to run to the cell in which Antigòn and Izmèn have been imprisoned and by instructing Tirezyas to shake the ason and call, surprisingly, upon Antigòn. Both directives, given to terrestrial and spiritual messengers respectively, aim to save Emon at the last possible moment, but they also demonstrate that Kreyon has now lost control of his administration, since he no longer gives the orders. This loss of political control is reiterated by the fact that Kreyon chooses to join in Filo’s task, and both leave the stage to find Emon. At this point, anyone familiar with the plays by Sophocles and Anouilh will be braced for the inevitability of Emon’s death, but here Morisseau-Leroy effects his most radical innovation on the traditional story line. As with Bergeaud’s decision to keep Romulus from killing Remus, Morisseau-Leroy hacks the classical narrative, thereby showing his refusal to be dominated by that tradition. But whereas Bergeaud had made a bold move in re-working Rome’s founding myth, Morisseau-Leroy goes

150  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer a step further by pairing his counter-reading of the canon with an unwavering endorsement of the ethics and aesthetics of Haitian Creole and Vodou. Rather than finding two dead (or dying) bodies, the audience witnesses a Vodou miracle. The first sign of this is that Tirezyas manages to contact Antigòn at all. Kreyon had attempted to silence and dominate her by taking her soul and leaving nothing but a zonbi. Far from this, Antigòn’s soul has been freed from her body, from Kreyon and from all mortal concerns, and she has become a spirit – not a disembodied zonbi to be controlled by a bokor but an independent entity transitioning into a new world. And she does not make this transition alone, because Emon’s voice soon joins that of Antigòn, and the stage must be nearly frozen visually as the unseen Antigòn coaxes the unseen Emon to join her in their new life together, in which they move beyond pain and suffering. Antigòn claims that she has become the daughter of Danmbala and Ayida Wèdo (Ayida-Weddo, a lwa of water, snakes and fertility who, like Èzili Freda, is married to Danmbala) and then tells Emon that he has become the son of these powerful lwa. Tragedy finds space for romance as we hear the lovers join in a sacred, spiritual marriage that is so starkly denied them in most versions of this story.36 As married children of Danmbala and Ayida Wèdo, this marriage replays the form of Oedipal incest, but as spirits who are adoptive siblings, this new form of marriage actually offers a solution to the Oedipal curse. The voices of Antigòn and Emon fall silent as Filo and Kreyon return to the stage and relate that in the place of dead bodies they found two rainbows stretching from the house to the heavens. It is not clear precisely what Antigòn and Emon have become at this point, but strict categorization is hardly the goal. In Vodou terms they have left to join the ancestral spirits, become ‘deified’ (Fradinger, 142, original emphasis), and may have become lwa. Their adoption by Danmbala and Ayida Wèdo gives them special status, and the rainbow found in place of their bodies is a manifestation of their adoptive mother. On one level, this elevation of Antigòn and Emon amounts to MorisseauLeroy’s most didactic point, that the people of Haiti have the power to shape their own destiny and their own spiritual universe. In another way, however, this transformation of Antigòn and Emon represents the perfect fusing of the Greek canon and Haitian culture. The mortal figures familiar from the ancient Athenian stage, such as Antigone, Oedipus, Medea and Agamemnon, already enjoyed a privileged existential status, since some were recipients of cult worship as heroes or demi-gods, and all were part of the fabric of the ever-updatable myths of Dionysiac performance. Greek tragedy, like the theatrical ceremony of Bois Caïman or the ceremonial theatricality of Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn, was sacred, and Antigòn and Emon, the married rainbow children of two powerful lwa, now exist at the intersection of Haiti and Greece, and at the crossroads of the worlds of the living and the spirits. Conclusion In 1953, Morisseau’s Antigòn was a huge success in Haiti, ‘a must’ according Haiti Sun.37 The play brought tragic drama to countless viewers through huge outdoor performances at the Theatre de Verdure after a more limited run in the upscale Rex

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  151 Theatre. One reviewer recouped Price-Mars’ critique of Sylvain’s Cric? Crac! by wondering why the playwright had chosen a Greek classic rather than composing a purely original Haitian drama, but the future of Creole, Greco-Vodou theater and literature seemed promising.38 In quick succession Franck Fouché staged a Creole adaptation of Oedipus Rex (1953) and Morisseau-Leroy reworked Anouilh’s Medée in Creole (1956), the first play performed at Theatre d’Haiti, which Morisseau-Leroy built himself. Although neither of these playscripts has survived, other evidence paints a dynamic picture. In a preview of Fouché’s play that would debut the very next day, Morisseau-Leroy wrote: ‘We are watching a two-fold event: the uplifting of a language that we have neglected too long to utilize as a vehicle of universal culture, and the triumphant meeting of the Haitian culture with the vital culture of ancient Greeks’ (1953). He goes on to situate this movement of Creole theater, both an artistic achievement in itself and a form of popular education, as a critical element in ‘achiev[ing] national unity in this land won, one hundred and fifty years ago by the heroism of the slaves of Saint Domingue’ (ibid). Continuing in this vein, Haiti Sun ran an article in 1956 about Morisseau-Leroy that captured his life promoting Creole drama.39 He was developing his next production, Anatole, and based on his understanding that ‘a voodoo ceremony is a play’, he found non-professional actors at an hounfour, or Vodou temple, near his home in Petionville. He worked with them to develop the narrative and then gave over the directing to ‘Madame Renaud, the famous Congo Queen of “Nationale Folklorique” ’ (who had played Marenn in the first performances of Antigòn), and she prepared the production while the actors, in their spare time, built a theater. At this moment, the prospects seemed high for a burgeoning Creole literary and theatrical scene. The trend of writing about the realities of Haitian life, that had started with the likes of Hibbert and Sylvain at the turn of the century, had made amazing strides. Although Vodou and Creole appear in these writers with satirical (Hibbert) or Christianizing (Sylvain) tones, their increasing prominence in Haitian literary culture is both significant and progressive. Yet these critical early steps stalled as the U.S. occupation re-entrenched elite Francophile habits, and this generation of writers faded away. Justin Lhérisson, the most progressive in his use of Creole of this group, died in 1907, and Frédéric Marcelin, who had published a trio of ground-breaking novels in rapid succession (Thémistocle Epaminondas Labasterre in 1901, La Vengeance de Mama in 1902, and Marilisse in 1903), seems to have given up serious writing in favor of working in the government. Sylvain lived until 1925 but left literature for journalism. Only Hibbert produced an important literary work during and about the occupation: his last novel, Les Simulacres (1923). As this generation of writers fell silent, Price-Mars denounced the ‘collective Bovarysme’ of the Haitian elite and called upon the nation to embrace its eclectic, and especially African, ancestry, in part by arguing that the Haitian peasantry was fundamentally similar to the peasant majorities of ancient Greece and Rome. In many ways, Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn was the first work to rise to Price-Mars’ challenge, since it was a thorough celebration of the verbal power of Creole and

152  Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer the narrative potential of Vodou. Antigòn enacted a counter-reading of the canon by placing the lwa on the same footing as the Greek gods (a strategy reflected in Price-Mars’ thinking) and by framing the political, social and philosophical crux of the myth of Antigone in terms of Haitian realities. I have always found the idea of a ‘timeless classic’ to be hopelessly insipid, since that phrasing suggests that a story can be equally meaningful at all times. Instead, I prefer the idea of a ‘timely classic’, and Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn was just that – a work of theatrical literature that spoke to the post-occupation circumstances of Haiti by championing the language and religion of the majority of his compatriots. In 1957, however, this all changed with the election of Duvalier. Morisseau-Leroy’s play continued to be important, but as Haitian culture buckled under the violence of Duvalierism, Antigòn quickly came to take on a whole new range of meanings. Notes 1 – Tu penses qu’il faudrait essayer d’écrire en créole? – Oui, pourquoi pas? Jean Rictus a écrit en argot. Il a dit tout ce qu’il a voulu dire. – Tu crois que le créole ne risquerait pas d’isoler le poète haïtien davantage du reste du monde? – En tout cas, ceux qui écrivent de petits sonnets insignifiants dans le plus pur français classique ne sont pas moins isolés, puisque, dis-toi bien, aucun lecteur étranger sérieux ne perd son temps à lire ces singeries, à moins que ce soit pour en rire. I learned of this passage from Matthew Robertshaw’s unpublished biography of Morisseau-Leroy, which he generously shared with me. I hope that the biography will eventually be published, since it collects a great deal of information that is difficult to assemble and it contains valuable interpretive insights as well. 2 Another critical moment in the emergence of Creole literature is Oswald Durand’s 1883 poem Choucoune. Durand (1840–1906) published almost exclusively in French, but Choucoune stands out as the earliest extant example of Creole literature. 3 In the Declaration of Independence, this and similar references to things French are broadly intended to include French culture and people rather than a narrow comment on the French language. 4 Ramsey 2011, 118–247 analyzes the status and standing of Vodou during and after the U.S. occupation. 5 Isaac is regularly described Louverture’s son. 6 The title means ‘burlap sack’, and the first edition was published in Port-au-Prince by H. Deschamps. This collection would later be revised according to updated orthography under the title Dyakout, and Morisseau-Leroy periodically added further installments. Morisseau-Leroy 1990 collects all four volumes. 7 Morisseau-Leroy’s play has been published in several formats: Antigone en créole (Pétionville: Culture, 1953). It later appeared with updated orthography in a compendium of his oeuvre up to that time: Antigone en créole; Diacoute; Natif-natal; Un conte en vers; Récolte (Nendeln: Krauss reprint, 1970). It was reissued and orthographically updated again in a collection of his theatrical work as Antigòn (Morisseau-Leroy 1997), and I follow this edition here. A French translation was published in conjunction with the play’s debut in Paris: L’Antigone créole, E. St.-Amant, trans., Paris: Présence africaine. An English translation, now lost, by Mary Dorkonou was made for the Ghanaian debut in 1963 under the title Antigone in Haiti, and Morisseau-Leroy (1983, 18) said that this text was used with some adaptations for the performance at the National Theater Festival in Jamaica during his residency at the University of the West Indies in 1978–79.

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  153 8 Prest does note that a ‘young female actor of mixed racial ancestry, Lise, performed the black role of Thérèse’ at a performance in Saint-Marc in 1786, but it seems most probable that this actor was not enslaved. It is, of course, possible that black or enslaved performers appeared onstage without leaving a trace in the surviving announcements, reviews, and playbills. One of Prest’s main arguments, however, is that the use of parody, including performances in black-face, served to domesticate and render innocuous the lives and, especially, the dances of enslaved communities. On this thesis, a preference might have existed against having dark-skinned actors play dark-skinned characters, since black-face would better support the ideology of white supremacy. 9 For Fouché’s play, see the anticipatory notice by Morisseau-Leroy (1953). 10 Clark 1992, 783. 11 This quip is reported without wider context or explanation in the weekly column ‘ti Joseph report’ in the Haiti Sun (Oct. 2, 1955, p. 4). Although ‘Ti Joseph’ attributes the sentiment to Morisseau-Leroy it is not clear that this is a verbatim quotation. Nonetheless, the idea that Creole is now the ‘original’ language shows the extent to which MorisseauLeroy considered his play to be something other than a conservative translation of the Sophoclean playscript. 12 This contrasts with the works of Hibbert and Sylvain, whose use of Creole or Creolized French seem exclusively intended for Francophone audiences. Morisseau-Leroy 1992, 669: ‘I wanted Antigone to be a success, a literary success. It was performed in places in the world where the international papers could write about it and make Creole an international language of literature.’ 13 Fradinger 2011, 135. 14 I follow the Creole of the 1997 edition, and English translations are based on my collaboration with Guilene Fiefie. 15 This is Fugard’s summary of the myth as conveyed to Ron Jenkins in a telephone interview (Jenkins 2003). 16 Dominique 2002, 46 reads Kreyon’s position as marred from the start, which thus undermines the dynamics of tragedy: Alors que Morisseau fige Créon dans la condemnation des dieux dès depart, ne permettant nulle surprise, nul débat intense à l’action tragique! 17 Steiner 1984 and Mee and Foley 2011 offer studies of the broad dispersal of Antigone’s story. 18 Again, the symmetry is more pronounced in Creole, since the past and present tenses are not always morphologically distinct. Li di can mean ‘he/she says/said’. 19 Fradinger 2011, 144 also connects Antigòn, as the protector of the heroic corpse, with Dédée Basile, who gathered up Dessalines’ dismembered corpse and gave it burial and suggests that Morisseau-Leroy’s Kreyon may be inspired by Henri Christophe. 20 This invocation of the sun could also look toward the choral entry song (parodos) of Sophocles’ Antigone, which begins with an invocation of the rays of the sun (ἀκτὶς ἀελίου, 100), or to the Greek idea that the Aithiopians (Αἰθιοπῆες) lived at the eastern and western extremities of the world where the sun rises and sets. Like many Vodou lwa, Legba is also connected to figures within the Roman Catholic tradition. Seen from this perspective, he is a biform of St. Peter, the gate-keeper of heaven, and St. Lazarus, who begged at the gate of a rich man who refused him charity (rather than the man brought back to life by Jesus). 21 My translation of ‘ces âmes divinisées (ou canonisées) par la mort, c’est ce que les Grecs appelaient Daïmon ou Héros et que les Latins désignaient sous les noms de Lare, Mânes, Génies’ (1918, iv). According to Derby 2015, 410, Holly’s father, James Arthur Holly, was born into slavery in the U.S. and after gaining his freedom became an abolitionist and Episcopal bishop who visited Haiti. Derby stresses the importance of the younger Holly’s connection between ancient Greece and Haiti in a way that fits perfectly with the end of Morisseau-Leroy’s play: ‘Holly . . . transposed a Central African belief in ancestral spirits into a Greek topos of souls divinized or canonized by death’ (412).

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28 29 30

31 32 33

See also Brouard 1939–40, and Dash 1998, 75–76, which discusses Brouard’s article and the connections it forges between ancient Greek religion and Vodou in terms of the growing interest in fascism in Haiti in this era. Rigaud, 1953. Similarly, the Swiss-Argentine anthropologist Alfred Métraux made several comparisons between Greek mythological religion and Haitian Vodou in Métraux 1959. For this idea, see Morrison (1990, 134–135) and the Introduction. This bookending of Antigòn’s no! and Filo’s yes informs Fradinger’s claim that the tragedy of the play is not to be found in characters’ deaths but, rather, in their obedience (2011, 143). Morisseau-Leroy played the part of Tirezyas in the first performances in Haiti as well as in the 1959 performances in Paris (and possibly in other performances as well). Cantor 1996 notes that the elder Morisseau-Leroy had ‘pale, almost translucent pupils [that] give him a mystical countenance, like that of a tribal wise man incarnating sacred spirits’. Although the blindness of the Greek Tiresias is not emphasized in the Haitian play (a French review, Kemp 1959, even suggests mockingly that Tiresias seems to have been cured), perhaps Morisseau-Leroy felt that his appearance made him an apt seer. There are three primary branches or families of Vodou lwa: Rada, Petro and Congo. The groups are related and many lwa exist in multiple families, but each group has its own characteristics. For example, the Rada Èzili Freda contrasts with Èzili Dantor, the more violent Petro lwa who was invoked at the Bois Caïman ceremony in 1791 because of her role as a vengeful divinity. The Creole dyab or djab is etymologically connected to the French diable or ‘devil’, but the Christian concept of a supreme embodiment of evil is absent from Vodou cosmology. Although dyab can mean ‘devil’ in anti-Vodou rhetoric, within Vodou it designates a hot or particularly active spirit. They are ‘wild, individualistic, insatiable, untamed, supernatural, and superhuman spirits, whose function is magical protection or inquiry’ (Fradinger 2011, 140). Kreyon’s use of this term, which may simply accuse Antigòn of having extorted supernatural assistance, foreshadows her ultimate fate within the play. Fradinger 2011, n35 discusses what Sekle-Kite might mean, and, after noting a wide range of possible connotations, endorses the idea that this is a formulaic invocation of Baron Samedi, the chief lwa of the dead and cemeteries. ἀνθ᾽ ὧν ἔχεις μὲν τῶν ἄνω βαλὼν κάτω / ψυχήν τ᾽ ἀτίμως ἐν τάφῳ κατῴκισας, / ἔχεις δὲ τῶν κάτωθεν ἐνθάδ᾽ αὖ θεῶν / ἄμοιρον, ἀκτέριστον, ἀνόσιον νέκυν (1068–71). An excellent discussion of this theme remains Rehm 1994. The popular image of the zombie as a horror monster developed largely through media created in the U.S. during its occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). Particularly influential were W. B. Seabrook’s novel The Magic Island (1929) and Victor Halperin’s film White Zombie (1932). Zora Neal Hurston’s less sensationalized Tell My Horse (1938) nonetheless caused a sensation, since she published the first known photograph of a zonbi, a lethargic woman named Felicia Félix-Mentor, who was a patient at a hospital (180). Hurston visited Haiti in 1936, just after the end of the U.S. occupation, and she offers a wide range of stories about zonbis but ultimately agrees with her contact at the hospital that the best explanation for zombification is pharmacological, rather than being the result of sorcery. Rigaud 1953 contains one Vodou chant that involves a zonbi that bars someone’s path (as well as several songs about the lwa Jean Zonbi), but he offers no analysis of the zonbi. The most recent overarching study of the zonbi is Lauro 2015, though the more focused Hoermann 2017 challenges the commonly asserted connection between the zonbi and enslavement. Lhérisson writes primarily in French but, like Hibbert, with many elements of Creole and Frenchified Creole (kreyòl fransize). He used the term lodyans, rather than novella

Sophocles becomes a Haitian Writer  155 or short-story, to describe this piece as well as his La famille des Pitite-Caille (Portau-Prince, 1905). The lodyans is a specifically Haitian oral story-telling genre. 34 The cochons sans poil is one of several secret societies in Haiti reputed to have the spiritual power to inflict devastating harm. In Lhérisson’s story, zombification and sexual violence are associated traumas, since Zoune is raped by a figure named Cadet Jacques, whose name has passed into Creole as kadejak and means ‘rape’. Thomas Madiou 1989, 109, describes a period of mayhem on the streets of Port-au-Prince in 1812 in which someone named Cadet Jacques terrorized women. This seems to be the origin of the Creole word kadejak. 35 This novel was first published in 1931 with a preface by Price-Mars (Port-au-Prince, Collection Indigène). Frankétienne uses similar onomatopoetic syllables for the sounds made by the zonbis throughout Dézafi (1975). 36 Ancient Greek versions of the Antigone myth involving a marriage to Haemon did exist, though the evidence for such plays is scant. 37 ‘Antigone Great Success: To Be Presented Again October  18th,’ Haiti Sun, Oct. 11, 1953, p. 8. 38 Noted at Fradinger 2011, 145. 39 ‘From Farm to Stage in Ten Easy Lessons’, Haiti Sun, June 10, 1956, p. 2.

Historical Segue 3

Duvalierism and the Haitian Diaspora A prominent theme of the last three chapters was the opening of Haitian literature to the lived experiences of the Haitian majority in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in terms of the realities of the Vodou religion and the Creole language. Hibbert was part of the vanguard (together with Lhérisson, Marcelin and Sylvain) that introduced such material in light or passing ways. Price-Mars, writing his Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) after that movement had stalled and during the U.S. occupation, hectored francophone elites to admit and embrace their nation’s African heritage, especially in terms of religion and language. Seen from this perspective, Morisseau-Leroy’s 1953 debut of Antigòn might be viewed as a culminating triumph. Composed completely in Creole and rooted in the spiritual and ethical norms of Vodou, his play surely seemed like the starting point of a new era for Haitian theatre and literature. Yet that anticipated era looks far different in retrospect, because of the radical changes imposed by François, ‘Papa Doc,’ Duvalier (1907–71), who was elected president in 1957.1 Although many Haitian intellectuals, including all the authors studied in the previous chapters, had spent time abroad, either voluntarily or under compulsion, Duvalier and his son and successor, Jean-Claude, ‘Baby Doc,’ Duvalier (1951–2014), created and fostered a climate of terror that gave rise to the modern Haitian diaspora as massive numbers of Haitians left their country.2 Like Morisseau-Leroy, whom he knew from their student days, Duvalier grew up under the U.S. occupation (1915–1934), and he espoused many of the core ideas formulated by Price-Mars. He was highly educated, having been trained as a doctor in Haiti, earning a Master of Public Health in the U.S. and writing about Haitian ethnography in Action Nationale and Les Griots, the latter of which he co-founded. This intellectual background, combined with his experience of the consequences of U.S. intervention in the region, led him to embrace noirisme, or black nationalism, and to resist both the political dominance of the mixed-race Haitian elite and the direct involvement of the U.S. in Haiti (though both Duvalier regimes exploited U.S. anti-communist policies to receive protection and financial aid). And so, as the pro-U.S. and pro-elite regime of President Paul Magliore (in office 1950–56) deteriorated in the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel, which hammered the island in 1954, a brutal scramble for the presidency took shape in 1957, and, as Trouillot puts it, ‘Duvalierist terror came into its own during the campaign’ (1990, 149). DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-10

158  Duvalierism and the Haitian Diaspora A much larger field was soon whittled down to four primary contenders: Duvalier, Louis Déjoie, Daniel Fignolé, and Clément Jumelle. Duvalier undermined each of his rival’s chances through a combination of rhetoric and violence. Fignolé seemed to have an advantage when he became the Provisional President in May, but Duvalier’s allies in the military soon had him arrested, and they carried out a massacre of Fignolé’s supporters in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince in June. Jumelle was an experienced politician who had worked at the highest level under presidents Estimé and Magloire, but Duvalier painted him as complicit in the previous regimes’ corruption and failings and, with Duvalier’s increasingly open recourse to violence, Jumelle finally withdrew his candidacy and urged his supporters not to vote at all. This left Déjoie as the only viable rival to Duvalier, and the election concluded as a race between these two. Déjoie was a light-skinned business owner and grandson of President Fabre Geffard (in office 1859–67), who had overthrown President-turned-Emperor Faustin Soulouque (in office 1847–59), who had been a staunch supporter of Vodou and black leadership. Duvalier used all this against Déjoie, and promoted a version of noirisme rooted in what Trouillot calls ‘a double ideological coup’ (1990, 192): claiming, first, that race was the only possible foundation for national cohesion and, second, that the black middle class was the best representative of the disempowered masses. With this vision, Duvalier gained the support of the dark-skinned, rural, Creole-speaking majority, and he soundly defeated Déjoie in the September 1957 election. Ideologically, his presidency might have seemed on track to fulfill many of the aspirations of the likes of Firmin and Price-Mars (though Bergeaud’s hopes for a brotherhood of darker- and lighterskinned compatriots seemed unlikely in this era), but Duvalier began his presidency by expelling or executing his rivals. After a failed coup attempt in July of 1958 led by Alix Pasquet (one of Haiti’s few fighter pilots in World War II, who had trained as a member of the Tuskegee Airmen), Duvalier became increasingly violent and dictatorial. His distrust of the military led him to establish a special paramilitary group in 1959 that would eventually be given the official name Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, but which would be known to everyone as the Tonton Macoute. One of the most prominent outrages of the early Duvalier era also impacted the legacy of Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn in a surprising way. After he had withdrawn from the 1957 presidential campaign, Jumelle went into hiding. In the months that followed, two of his brothers were executed by Duvalier’s men, all his assets were confiscated, and he was working with Déjoie and Fignolé to garner anti-Duvalierist support in Cuba. But with his health declining in such stressful circumstances, Jumelle died on April 11, 1959. His funeral was held on the next day, and as the procession moved through the streets of Port-au-Prince, Duvalier’s men arrived and confiscated the hearse carrying Jumelle’s body in front of a huge crowd of onlookers. Bernard Diederich, the editor of the Haiti Sun, recalls that: ‘Word quickly spread that Duvalier had ordered Jumelle’s body brought to him at the palace so that Jumelle’s heart could be removed to make a potent ouanga [or wanga, a Vodou talisman]’ (Diederich and Burt 1969, 139). The public desecration of Jumelle’s

Duvalierism and the Haitian Diaspora  159 body, which recalls the treatment of Charlemagne Péralte’s body by the U.S. military in 1919, was both a horrific affront and yet another sign of Duvalier’s new tactics for authoritarian control. Paul Christopher Johnson uses the case of Jumelle as the basis for the broader claim that ‘The mysterious theft of bodies (public but secret) was one of Duvalier’s means of circulating the repute of his priestly power’ (2006, 434 n. 9). Morisseau-Leroy had supported Jumelle’s candidacy, and so it was not surprising that he attended the funeral on April 12.3 In a 1992 interview, he drew a direct comparison between his Antigòn of 1953, composed without Duvalier in mind, and his subsequent Wa Kreyon, which was published in 1978 and which explicitly and intentionally engaged with Duvalierism. He described Duvalier’s behavior in terms of that of Kreyon, and he added his personal witness to this mythico-historical moment (Morisseau-Leroy 1992, 669): He arrested a body in the street . . . He stopped a funeral in the middle of the street. That was in April 1959. I am very precise about the date because I watched it. I was there. And whenever I describe it, I must say, I died that day. It’s a miracle that I am alive, because I died that day. Because, for what I did, I would normally have been killed, but they spared me. Duvalier becomes Kreyon as he mistreats the body of Jumelle, who, in turn, becomes Polinis. This leaves Morisseau-Leroy balancing between the roles of Antigòn, who stands in the face of oppression and refuses to bend, and yet another victim of the tyrant. Morisseau-Leroy lived on, but he also claims to have died in a real and meaningful way, and thus he embodies one of the themes of the myth of Antigone, namely bodies that violate the neat separation of the living from the dead. In this vein, Antigòn anticipates her death while still alive; the corpse of Polinis remains among the living; and Morisseau-Leroy begins his exile as a living person who has already experience a kind of death. In his unpublished biography of Morisseau-Leroy, Robertshaw notes that it was at this moment that MorisseauLeroy began working on his sequel to Antigòn. Although Wa Kreyon was not published until 1978, his own reflection on his experience makes it clear that in 1959 Morisseau-Leroy was thinking of Duvalier explicitly in terms of Kreyon. In the mythological narrative, Antigòn stays in place and resists Kreyon at the cost of her life. Morisseau-Leroy opted to leave and oppose Duvalierism (and political oppression more generally) through his work in the theater. Soon after Jumelle’s funeral, Morisseau-Leroy went into exile and spent most of the next two decades in West Africa. He would never again live in Haiti, and it is for this reason that I return to him in the following chapters on writers of the Haitian diaspora. His Wa Kreyon was composed in Dakar (even if the kernel of the idea came to him at Jumelle’s funeral in 1959) and offers a more bluntly political sequel to Antigòn. Like Morisseau-Leroy, the other authors studied in the chapters ahead have similar stories of displacement under Duvalierism. In 1976 Dany Laferrière (b. 1953), whose father had already been exiled by Pap Doc, left Haiti for Canada as a young man, and in the early 1970’s, the parents of Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) emigrated

160  Duvalierism and the Haitian Diaspora to the U.S., where she joined them several years later at the age of twelve. These three authors (Morisseau-Leroy, Laferrière, and Danticat), whose lives were interrupted at quite different points by the Duvalier regimes, nevertheless share and reflect in their work the traumatizing experiences of physical, cultural and spiritual dislocation. On this latter point, they typify the life narratives of so many members of the richly diverse Haitian diaspora, shaped to such a large extent by the violence and chaos that the Duvaliers unleashed within Haiti. Papa Doc Duvalier’s original political goal was not the brutality and mayhem for which he is remembered but, rather, the fulfillment of a radical, racial liberation that had been promised but never fully achieved in 1804. This argument can be seen most fully in Le problème des classes à travers l’histoire d’Haiti, which he wrote with Lorimer Denis and which was published in its entirety in 1948 after appearing as a series of articles in Chantiers.4 In this work Duvalier and Denis present what Nicholls has termed the ‘black legend’ (1996, 194–196), namely the idea that from the colonial era the key issue in Haiti had always been that of racialized class conflict.5 On their argument, the mixed-race elite had always opposed black liberation – in the limited aspirations of Vincent Ogé’s rebellion (which sought political enfranchisement for gens-de couleur but not an end to slavery), in Rigaud’s rivalry with Louverture, and especially in the assassination of Dessalines. They outline a history in which, with few exceptions, such as the presidency of Salomon (so excoriated by Hibbert in Romulus), the mixed-race elite had oppressed and marginalized the black majority. Seen from this perspective, Duvalier’s election in 1957 promised to pick up the revolutionary histories of Haiti and black liberation where they had been interrupted by the assassination of Dessalines. And Trouillot reminds us that in contemporary accounts of Duvalier’s rise ‘noirisme was perceived as the only viable political alternative by the vast majority of the middle classes’ (1990, 134). In this sense, the reactions to Duvalierism that shape the diasporic texts discussed here all participate in the ongoing process of acknowledging, coming to terms with, and rebuilding in the aftermath of the failures of Duvalierism to live up to the lofty goals set out by the young François Duvalier. And both Laferrière and Danticat follow Morisseau-Leroy’s example of turning to the figure of Antigòn/Antigone when they meditate on the Duvaliers’ treatment of the bodies of their political enemies. For Morisseau-Leroy, it was Clément Jumelle in 1959. For Laferrière, it was Gasner Raymond in 1976. And for Danticat, delving into the historical trauma of her family and her Bel Air neighborhood, it was Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin in 1964, who were executed several years before she was even born. Notes 1 For important discussions of the Duvalier and Duvalierism, see Bonhomme 1957, Depestre 1968, Dash 1981, Dorsinville 1986, Trouillot 1990, Nicholls 1996, and Smith 2009. 2 Every Haitian author discussed in detail in this book pursued advanced academic work in France or North America. Boyer (France), Bergeaud (St. Thomas), Firmin (St. Thomas), and Morisseau-Leroy (U.S.) all died abroad; Laferrière and Danticat now live in Canada and the U.S., respectively. Gibson and Jung 2006 show that the Haitian-born

Duvalierism and the Haitian Diaspora  161 population in the U.S. grew roughly from 5,000 in 1960 to 225,000 in 1990, using the census data that most narrowly spans the Duvalier era. For studies of the Haitian Diaspora, see Laguerre 1998, Jackson 2011, Zacaïr 2011; Mocombe 2020. 3 Morisseau-Leroy’s support for Jumelle is noted in Robertshaw’s unpublished biography of Morisseau and derives from an interview that Robertshaw conducted with Bernard Diederich, a friend of Morisseau-Leroy and editor of the Haitian Sun. 4 I have not been able to see a copy of the 1948 text, but at least as early as the 1965 edition (re-issued by Les Edition Fardin), the cover includes a (slightly adapted) quotation in Latin from Tacitus’ Agricola, 32: Perinde ituri in aciem et majores [vestros] et posteros cogitare, ‘so as you are about to join the battle, think of [your] ancestors and posterity’. This same phrase (with the infinitive cogitare replaced by Tacitus’ imperative cogitate) appeared on issues of Les Griots, the journal that Duvalier co-founded. These Haitian texts omit Tacitus’ vestros, ‘your’, perhaps suggesting a contrast between Tacitus’ plea that each soldier think of his own familial ancestors, and a broader appeal to the role of the communal ancestors in Vodou. 5 This ‘black legend’ easily incorporates the likes of the light-skinned Ogé, who did not advocate for an end to slavery, and the liberationist Dessalines, but Nicholls points out that neither Pétion nor Christophe, for example, fit the model smoothly and were largely ignored by Duvalier and Denis.

7

Antigòn in West Africa Morisseau-Leroy’s Wa Kreyon (1978)

Morisseau-Leroy in West Africa The success of Antigòn in 1953 amplified Morisseau-Leroy’s prominence in Haiti, and this made him an obvious target as Duvalier began to exert totalitarian power in 1957. Travelling abroad in Paris, London and New York, friends urged him not to return, but he did. ‘From May  1958 to May  1959 what happened around me was terrible,’ he recalled in a 1996 interview (Cantor 1996). Political rivals, artists and activists – many his close friends – were exiled, jailed or killed outright. The case of Jumelle in mid-April, whose body was confiscated by Duvalier in the midst of his public funeral procession (as described in the previous section), brought Morisseau-Leroy’s own situation to the breaking point. In a strange twist, at a moment when Morisseau-Leroy easily could have become yet another victim of Papa Doc’s regime, Duvalier chose to honor their former friendship and personally arranged to have Morisseau-Leroy driven to the airport in the ‘Number One’ (the president’s personal car). And so, in 1959 Morisseau-Leroy joined the quickly growing Haitian diaspora. He flew to France and soon took a job teaching French literature in Nigeria before moving to Ghana, which had gained independence from Great Britain in 1957, the same year that Papa Doc took power in Haiti. Based in Accra, he served as the national organizer of drama and literature, and his presence must have felt significant.1 On the one hand, he came from the first independent ‘Black Republic’ and for the Ghanaians, who had just earned their independence, he must have radiated an aura of cultural experience and liberationist success;2 on the other hand, he was in exile from a brutal dictator whose extreme form of noirisme exerted a corrosive violence over Haiti that was on par with the horrors of the colonial era. One wonders to what extent such tensions were felt in 1963 when he staged his Antigòn in Accra in English, using a translation (now seemingly lost) titled Antigone in Haiti by Mary Dorkonou. In Haiti, many reflected that his Kreyon of 1953 anticipated Duvalier of the late 1950’s, but in Ghana, Morisseau-Leroy must have been ‘entirely confident that [President Kwame] Nkrumah could never become a tyrant’ (Gibbs 2009, 26). Nevertheless, the act of reperformance in changed circumstances transformed the meaning of the play. The comments in the prologue (and discussed in Chapter  6) that both Antigòn and Kreyon have justification for their actions, which recall a typical Greek DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-11

Antigòn in West Africa  163 balancing of tragic positions, must have been understood through the lenses of Duvalier’s brutality in Haiti and the promises of independence in Ghana (and, indeed, across Africa). In 1963, we can even imagine the play taking on a protreptic tone of encouraging Nkrumah, who was deeply invested in promoting the theatrical arts, to avoid governmental overreach. In this way, Antigòn, which Morisseau-Leroy had composed with the express intention of fostering populist, Creole theatre in Haiti, became a piece that was diasporic, African and more immediately political, bringing it closer to later works such as Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973, Nigeria) and Athol Fugard’s The Island (1973, South Africa), which both had deeply political commitments. Soon after Nkrumah, technically ‘president for life’, was removed from office through a coup in February 1966 and Ghana moved in a more Euro-U.S., capitalist direction, Morisseau-Leroy joined a cadre of prominent Haitians in Dakar and lived in Senegal until 1981, when he relocated to the U.S. and settled in Miami.3 Throughout this period, Morisseau-Leroy continued to foster popular theater in the language of the people and to build ‘a militant Creole language movement which extends beyond the confines of the archipelago . . . ready to defend itself against the wiles of cultural imperialism’ (Morisseau-Leroy 1983, 20).4 And it was in Dakar that Morisseau-Leroy developed new versions of the story of Antigone – first in a short poem in 1972 and then in a pair of plays published in 1978. A Haitian (An)tigòn in Senegal (1972) The second volume of Morisseau-Leroy’s Creole poetry appeared in 1972 under the title Dyakout 2.5 These poems continued his project of insisting that Creole be recognized in Haiti as its national language and internationally as a viable language of literature and theatre, and they represent some of the first works of Haitian diasporic literature in Creole. At times they are global in scope, with references to the likes of Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, U.S. Presidents Nixon and Johnson, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro and others. At other times, Morisseau-Leroy’s verses focus on specific locations in Haiti, few of which would be readily recognizable to readers unfamiliar with Haitian history or geography. His Antigòn in this volume (not to be confused with his 1953 play) falls into this category, and it is held together by lines of nostalgic tension between Senegal, where they were composed, and Haiti, where they are set. This thirty-line Antigòn offers a meditation on the relationship between Antigone’s countless deaths on stage and her relationship to political violence in the streets. Morisseau-Leroy begins by conjuring a markedly different narrative context from his 1953 play. The prologue to that piece had welcomed unfamiliar audiences into his tale with introductions of characters and plots, a summary of his method for Haitianizing the ancient story, and by having the narrating voice merge with the audience by saying: M kou nou tout la a. M prale rete gade yo.

164  Antigòn in West Africa M prale chita tande yo. Men Antigòn nou an. I am like all of you present here. I will stay and watch them. I am going to sit down and listen to them. Here is our Antigòn. By contrast, the 1972 poem begins by pushing away readers, who are implied by the imperative verbs: ‘Leave me with Antigòn/I have a few things to say to her’ (Kite m ak Antigòn/M gen de mo pou m di ak li, pp. 58–59, lines 1–2).6 This pretense of intimacy between the narrating voice and Antigòn creates a conspiratorial atmosphere that leaves readers either to eavesdrop or (especially if reading aloud) to inhabit the first-person voice as their own. The speaker says not to cry for Antigòn, because she is used to dying (Pa bezwen kriye pou Antigòn/pou mouri l abitye mouri, 3–4). This habituation to death provides the pivot with which Morisseau-Leroy brings together theatrical and necropolitical histories (5–9): Se jodi Antigòn ap mouri Nan tout kafou Nan tout teyat Depi 2500 zan y ap bat bravo Pou yon ti fi ki konn ki jan pou l mouri She has long been dying On every street corner In every theatre For 2500 years they have been shouting bravo For a girl who knows how to die. Morisseau-Leroy strips away any tragic grandiosity, such as the Hegelian idea that the Sophoclean Antigone can be understood as a confrontation between two justified and justifiable positions, and condemns the scopophilia of generations of audiences who have simply enjoyed watching this girl die over and over. Again, the narrator pushes others away, now suggesting other mythical interlocutors who are also available (10–12): Lese m ak Antigòn Ale pale ak Emon Ale console Ismèn Leave me with Antigòn Go talk to Emon Go comfort Ismèn For the narrator, Emon and Ismèn are irrelevant here, since only Antigòn is important in this condensed poetic space. Morisseau-Leroy reveals the dirty secret about

Antigòn in West Africa  165 her story that moves from the theatre to the streets by shifting Kreon’s crime from the stage to the immediate present, in lines in which he seems to be reliving the trauma of seeing Duvalier’s men steal Jumelle’s body (19–24): Wa Kreon fèk vòlò kadav Polinis Ankò nan Kafou Tifou L al vòlò kadav Polinis Dèyè lakomin Jeremi L al vòlò kadav Polinis Jouk sou plas-dam Pòdpe King Kreon has just stolen Polinis’ corpse Again at Tifou Crossing He goes to steal Polinis’ corpse Behind city hall in Jérémie He goes to steal Polinis’ corpse Even in the square of Port-de-Paix. Tifou Crossing is a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, and Jérémie and Portde-Paix are cities in the south and north of Haiti, respectively. These three points of reference map the span of the country, but without naming either of the nation’s two most famous cities (Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien). Readers with intimate familiarity of Haiti can visualize these spaces specifically and realize that Kreon here stands specifically in the role of Papa Doc. But just as figures from Greek and Roman mythology (Antigone, Oedipus, Achilles, et al.) and history (e.g., Leonidas, Spartacus, Caligula) have come to serve as typologies for individuals or social circumstances, Morisseau-Leroy invites any reader anywhere to understand that this Haitian Kreon has people killed in public squares and in the shadowy alleys behind governmental buildings. As such, this Haitian Kreon, becomes both a stand-in for the specific figure of Duvalier and a universal template for oppression. The poem ends by finally shifting into the direct address promised in the opening couplet (25–30): Koute m byen Tigòn Se pa kapab ou menm k ap mouri tout tan Yon jou pou chase yon jou pou jibye N ap met ansanm pou n chanje plak la Aswè a sa pap pase konsa Aswè a nou pral pran pat Wa Kreon. Listen closely to me, ‘tigòn: You can’t keep dying all the time ‘A day for the hunter, a day for the prey’ We will work together to change the record Tonight it will be different Tonight we will get even with King Kreon.

166  Antigòn in West Africa The Greek Antigone has changed again, not just into the transliterated Antigòn of 1953 but into the more Creole sounding Tigòn (like Ti-Bita or Ti-Blan from Hibbert’s Romulus or Ti-Malice of Haitian folklore).7 The poetic speaker addresses the mythical figure as if she were a dissident who keeps getting arrested. He draws her further into the specifically Haitian idiom with the proverb ‘A day for the hunter, a day for the prey,’ before shifting into the first person plural. This conspiracy is sealed with the promise that we (n, the syncopated form of nou) will hack the classical narrative of change being leveraged over the body of a dead woman. Instead, the speaker promises, King Kreon, the mythical analog to the historical brutality of Duvalierism, will pay the price. Wa Kreyon (1978) Six years after publishing this poetic address to Antigòn with the promise to take vengeance on King Kreyon (spelled Kreon in the poem), Morisseau-Leroy released a new and more overtly political play about Antigòn’s family. Wa Kreyon (King Kreyon, 1978), which he described as his most important play (Morisseau-Leroy 1992, 669).8 For Morisseau-Leroy, the importance of Wa Kreyon derives from the fact that it is his intentional and focused critique of authoritarian power as wielded by the Duvalier regimes. Whereas Antigòn was, in his mind, first and foremost about the Creole language and Haitian literature and sharpened its political significance primarily in retrospect and in diasporic iterations, Wa Kreyon was conceptualized from the start as a means of revealing the dynamics of tyrannical violence. As a work of Haitian literature, it speaks directly to the abuses of the Duvaliers, but as a diasporic script it participates in the global discourse about such power as seen in any context.9 In this vein, whereas the 1963 Ghanaian performance of Antigòn came on the heels of Brathwaite’s debut of Odale’s Choice in 1962 and had prefigured Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides and Fugard’s The Island as African neoclassical counter-readings of ancient Greek material, Wa Kreyon follows the lead of those three plays that deal with, respectively, the emergence of independent Ghana, the military dictatorship in Nigeria and the racialized police state of apartheid South Africa. And having seen not only the rise of Duvalier in Haiti but also the fall of Nkrumah in Ghana, Morisseau-Leroy must have hoped that Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), the first president of independent Senegal from 1960 until 1980 and a formally trained classicist, would heed the cautionary lesson of this new iteration of the Haitian Kreyon. If Wa Kreyon presents Morisseau-Leroy’s purest critique of political oppression, the play also offers a wholly new narrative involving the family of Antigone. Although Antigòn herself is dead and gone before the first scene, we are again in Tèb with Kreyon, Izmèn (now Kreyon’s daughter), Tirezyas, Filo (Kreyon’s loyal attendant, as in the 1953 play), and, somewhat surprisingly since they had died in Antigòn, both Eredis and Emon. The plot is as simple as it is innovative in addressing the question of what would happen to Kreyon in the aftermath of so many deaths at the typical conclusion of the myth of Antigone, but Morisseau-Leroy

Antigòn in West Africa  167 shows no interest in having this story about Kreyon fit seamlessly with that of Antigòn. In this sense, Wa Kreyon is not a sequel to Antigòn (much as Sophocles’ three Theban plays, produced at different points in his career, do not form a neat or seamless trilogy). It is, rather, a new and wholly original story about the cursed family of Oedipus. The action takes place fourteen years after the death of Antigòn, and Kreyon, who has been sick for three months and in a death-like state for the last eight days, awakens having lost all memory of the intervening years. He knows Emon as a young boy, Eredis as his young wife and even himself as a much younger man. As his family and advisors fill in the gaps in his memory – from an anguished realization that his own youth has disappeared to the revelation that he had executed Antigòn and treated the people of Tèb with increasing brutality – Kreyon seems stunned, as if such actions do not feel like things he would have done. Kreyon’s confusion may reflect Morisseau-Leroy’s efforts to come to terms with the fact that the young and intellectually progressive Francois Duvalier, who had once been his friend, had become such an oppressive tyrant. But in the climax of the play, Kreyon embraces this violent persona as he unexpectedly kills Filo, his most loyal advisor. Morisseau-Leroy emphasized the capriciousness of this act, which he described as ‘completely crazy’ (1992, 670), as a key element of Duvalierism. To eliminate one’s rivals is an extreme form of logical partisanship, but to subject friends and enemies alike to the same violence amounts to a pure form of necropolitical totalitarianism in which no one can feel safe or confident of their position, even if they submit to the autocrat’s will.10 By the end of the play, Kreyon has transferred power to Emon, who replicates his father’s randomly murderous violence by killing Tirezyas and Manbo Lasirèn just as his father had killed Filo. Finally, Kreyon dies of poisoning when Izmen, loyal to the end, gives him what she thinks to be his medicine. Perhaps the most striking feature of this new play about Kreyon is that Morisseau-Leroy chose to return to the family of Edip at all. One critic of the 1953 Antigòn had asked why the playwright had devoted himself to reworking a familiar classic rather than composing an original play.11 Both sides of this argument are predictable. One the one hand, one might hope that an artist looking to promote a national theatrical movement would create something purely Haitian rather than relying on the pre-existing stories of another culture. Such a path would show that Haitian art can flourish without reliance upon external sources of inspiration (as if art can ever be isolated from such sources of creativity!) On the other hand, by engaging the story of Antigone, Morisseau-Leroy put his work in dialogue with a wider theatrical and literary discourse that already knew both the ancient Greek myth and more recent adaptations of it. But Wa Kreyon is neither an adaptation of a Sophoclean play nor wholly independent of Greek mythological narratives. This return to the family of Edip is, rather, a complex and layered story with shifting points of temporal and thematic reference. Although the plots of canonical plays can easily feel like the definitive form of a given myth, the narrative space of mythology is always flexible and open to new twists and turns. We can see this clearly in handlings of Oedipus’ family by

168  Antigòn in West Africa fifth-century BCE Athenian playwrights. Sophocles’ Antigone, of uncertain date but regularly thought to be no later than 441 BCE, is surely the earliest of his three surviving Theban plays, but it was clearly not intended to be the beginning of a connected or internally consistent trilogy. Presumably it responded to pressing issues of its day, perhaps connecting the play’s debate about proper burial practice with the recent trend in showier funerary displays by aristocratic Athenian families, a habit that chafed against democratic ideals.12 Whatever the case, Sophocles’ return to this mythological cycle in Oedipus Rex, produced sometime around the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) focused on other matters of public concern. Not only does the Theban plague within the play connect with the plague that devastated Athens in 430, but so too does the story’s focus on civic leadership and the downfall of an autocrat suggest debates about the wisdom of Pericles’ war strategy and his own death from the plague that killed so many in Athens at that time. And again, Sophocles’ final story about Oedipus, his Oedipus at Colonus, posthumously staged in 401 BCE, evokes parallels between the old playwright and the old Oedipus and the hopes that the accursed but now purified Theban king might provide magical protection to Athens, which at the time of Sophocles’ death in 406 or 405 BCE was struggling to maintain itself against Spartan advances. What Sophocles could not have known is that the Athenian audiences of 401 would view his play’s debut as a post-Peloponnesian War play, and however they did so, many viewers must have understood the end of Oedipus’ life in connection with recent turmoil – from the Athenian surrender to Sparta in 404 to the brief but brutal oligarchic reign of the Thirty Tyrants to the re-establishment of democracy in 403, which began a new period of growth and prosperity for Athens. But if these Sophoclean plays have become canonical standards, they hardly exhaust the range of what Athenian playwrights did with the family of Oedipus. In 467 BCE, for example, Aeschylus staged his Seven against Thebes (467 BCE), which dramatized the confrontation between Oedipus’ sons, Eteocles, who led the defense of Thebes, and Polyneices, leading an army from Argos, (which, in the chronology of the myth, places the narrative between those of the Sophoclean Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone), and Sophocles wrote an Epigoni, undated and surviving only in a few fragments, which narrated the second war between Argos and Thebes, in which the sons of the earlier war replay the confrontation of their fathers. Furthermore, Euripides wrote both an Antigone and an Oedipus, both of which are lost and undated. A fascinating version of the Antigone narrative is known from an extensive ancient summary, and it is now thought to be the work of Agathon, one of the most important Athenian tragedians known only from testimonia and fragments.13 In this lost version, Haemon, who has been charged with executing Antigone, disobeys his father and falsely claims that she has died (a narrative trick strikingly similar to the survival of the baby Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex). In reality, Antigone and Haemon secretly marry, and their son eventually is discovered by Creon years later. Like Morisseau-Leroy’s Wa Kreyon each of these plays is a discrete engagement with the family of Oedipus and Antigone composed in response to contemporary issues and formulated through the artist’s vision at the time of composition. To

Antigòn in West Africa  169 this list of ancient plays we can again reference various African adaptations from Morisseau-Leroy’s era, such as Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides, Fugard’s The Island, and Ali Salem’s The Comedy of Oedipus (1970). Seen from this perspective it is hardly surprising that Morisseau-Leroy returned to the figure of Kreyon without crafting a seamlessly connected sequel to his earlier Antigòn. Far from feeling an obligation to harmonize Wa Kreyon with Antigòn, MorisseauLeroy draws attention to the disjunctions between the two plays in order to highlight the contemporary relevance of the later production. Most obvious in this regard is the fact that Emon and Eridis, both of whom died in Antigòn, are alive and well in Wa Kreyon. Given Morisseau-Leroy’s comments in interviews about the connection between Wa Kreyon and Duvalier, this resurrection of Kreyon’s wife and son obviously fit with an analogical presentation of François Duvalier’s wife and son, Simone, ‘Mama Doc’ (1913–1997), and Jean-Claude, ‘Baby Doc’, Duvalier (1951–2014). Furthermore, François Duvalier had died in 1971 and transferred power to Jean-Claude, a reality that clearly shapes the theme of transferring power to Emon in Wa Kreyon. Izmèn, alive throughout both of Morisseau’s plays, must also stand for one or all the Duvaliers’ three daughters, most probably Marie-Denise, rather than Nicole or Simone. Wa Kreyon presents Emon as a chubby teenager who does not want to become king after his father and Izmèn as a highly capable politician, introduced with a Sophoclean image as se jenn fanm sa a ki kenbe bwa gouvènay batiman an, ‘this young woman who has held the ship’s helm’ (46) during the three months of her father’s illness.14 These characterizations fit perfectly with the corpulent Jean-Claude, who at age nineteen inherited a presidency that he did not want, and Marie-Denise, who served as her father’s secretary in his last years and who was a leading candidate to take over her father’s position.15 This intimate connection between Kreyon and François Duvalier leads to further insights about the plot of Wa Kreyon, especially the strange presentation of Kreyon’s health. Within the play, the King of Tèb has been incapacitated for three months, unresponsive for eight days, and he awakens without any memory of the intervening fourteen years. In May 1959, ‘Papa Doc’ had suffered a massive heart attack that left him in what his doctor described as a diabetic coma for nine hours. Clément Barbot, the head of the Tonton Macoute and Duvalier’s most loyal lieutenant at the time, oversaw Duvalier’s care and took power during his convalescence. Barbot was the de facto leader of Haiti for nearly three years, before Duvalier recovered enough to resume his official duties when, suspicious that Barbot had become power-hungry, he had his henchman thrown in prison, a detail that could be reflected in Kreyon’s killing of the loyal Filo.16 We can now take these numbers and feed them back into the details of Wa Kreyon, which seems to have shifted the units of time’s passing. The eight days of Kreyon’s death-like state reflect Duvalier’s nine hours of being in a coma. The three months of the king’s illness probably stand for the nearly three years that Barbot was in charge of the country. And the fourteen years of amnesia could represent various timeframes. Most obviously, the elder Duvalier was in power for fourteen years from 1957 to 1971, but this may not exhaust the possible implications of this fourteen-year period. These fourteen years could represent the time between

170  Antigòn in West Africa Morisseau-Leroy’s composition of Wa Kreyon and either Duvalier’s heart attack in 1959 (thus dating the writing of the play to 1973) or his complete recovery in 1961 (putting Wa Kreyon in 1975). Morisseau-Leroy published Wa Kreyon in 1978, but its date of composition and any staged debut remain unclear, and so another option is that the fourteen year period could point back from the 1978 publication of Wa Kreyon (and, on this argument, its composition in the same year) to 1964, the year in which Duvalier oversaw a constitutional adjustment that, among other things, made him ‘President for life’ and gave him power to appoint his successor, details that are relevant to Wa Kreyon. Furthermore, since the play places the execution of Antigòn fourteen years in the past (making it the first detail that Kreyon has forgotten), his killing of that young woman might also suggest Duvalier’s suppression of the Jeune (‘Young’) Haiti insurrection of 1964. Of course, Morisseau-Leroy need not have limited the numerical structure of his play to discrete historical specifics, and these details (Kreyon’s eight days of a death-like state, three months of dire illness and amnesia covering a fourteen-year period) prompt expansive, rather than restrictive, historical interpretation. In addition to thinking about the play’s historical and narrative timelines, we can also understand it as a counter-reading to the Duvalier regimes’ engagement with Africa. As mentioned above, the elder Duvalier emerged from the same intellectual movement shaped by Jean Price-Mars. The latter, a generation older than Papa Doc, had championed the idea that Haiti needed to step away from its French cultural ancestry, which came to Haiti through the dynamics of European colonization and which (in Price-Mars’ era) inappropriately overshadowed the African aspects of Haitian culture, that came through the European-controlled slave trade. The young Duvalier was part of the vanguard of thinkers to build upon PriceMars’ ideas in ways that emphasized the African and Caribbean aspects of Haitian identity. During his presidency, Duvalier’s Pan-Africanist ideals can be sensed not only in this promotion of Vodou and his opposition to the elitist and light-skinned tradition stretching back to Ogé and Rigaud, but also in the 1964 constitutional referendum. In addition to proclaiming Duvalier president-for-life, that referendum changed the Haitian flag, replacing the horizontal panels of blue (above) and red (below) with vertical panels of black (left) and red (right), with the black standing for Haiti’s African legacy.17 One potential response to Duvalier’s Pan-Africanism and his advocacy for Vodou could have involved a return to the ‘collective Bovaryism’ denounced by Price-Mars, but Morisseau-Leroy’s Wa Kreyon does something strikingly different, in part because it is a diasporic work. On the one hand, the narrative comes from the genius of a Haitian artist, the play is set in Haiti, and the script is composed in Creole – details that cast Wa Kreyon as a narrowly Haitian play. On the other hand, Morisseau-Leroy published (and perhaps composed) Wa Kreyon in Dakar, and it is, in light of his years spent in Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal, a West African play about the problems of political oppression in any context. From this perspective, Morisseau-Leroy counters the Duvalierist position, which paired a Pan-Africanist rhetoric with systemic political violence. As an anti-tyrannical diasporic script that is both Haitian and West African, Wa Kreyon affirms Haiti’s connections with

Antigòn in West Africa  171 Africa while denouncing the violence of Duvalierism. One of the most significant aspects of Morisseau-Leroy’s parrying of the Duvaliers’ form of Pan-Africanism is to be found in the play’s explanation for Kreyon’s brutality and his inability to remember that brutality, an issue that I will connect to the Greek myth of the Oedipal family curse after examining several moments in Wa Kreyon. The opening scene offers a lengthy and explanatory exchange between a Vwa Govi, ‘the voice from the govi, [i.e., the clay vessel from which the lwa can speak]’ and the Vwa Onsi yo, ‘the voice of the attendants’, who serve as a chorus throughout the play.18 The Vwa Govi relays that Tirezyas has recently had a vision explaining Kreyon’s situation: Lòt jou l dòmi l reve mèt tèt Wa Kreyon vini di l chwal la gan pou l reprann kòd tèt li anvan l mouri (48), ‘The other day, [Tirezyas] slept and dreamed that Kreyon’s mèt tèt came to tell him that the horse must take back the reins before he dies.’19 In Vodou possession, a lwa or spirit ‘mounts’ a ‘horse’ (the human medium) and thereby takes control of that person. The lwa that mounts a horse is sometimes described as the person’s mèt tèt, literally their ‘head’s master’. Under normal circumstances, a person’s sense of self or identity is comprised primarily of two spiritual entities that reside in the head, the tibònanj, literally the ‘small good angel’ that represents the conscience, and the gwobònanj, the ‘big good angel’ that controls memory and intelligence.20 In possession, the gwobònanj is displaced by the mèt tèt, the lwa specially associated with and served by the ‘horse’. This process, in which the mèt tèt takes the place of the memorycontrolling gwobònanj explains both that Kreyon’s actions over the last fourteen years have been guided by the mèt tèt and why the king cannot remember what has happened. The Vwa Govi also makes it plain that Kreyon will soon die. The intervention of the mèt tèt might seem to absolve Kreyon of any responsibility for his actions, but the mèt tèt is matched with a person in terms of their temperament and predilections.21 Thus, just as in Antigòn, Morisseau-Leroy uses the dynamics of Vodou to dramatize the perspective that Duvalierism represents one of many possible manifestations of Haitian spiritual politics. Just as the lwa had given Kreyon the freedom to make the rash decisions that led, in the earlier play, to the deaths of his son, wife and niece, so too in Wa Kreyon is Vodou associated with, but not limited to, Duvalierism. This point comes into sharp relief when Kreyon, trying to reconstruct events, asks Emon about the death of Antigòn. The king recalls that Emon and Antigòn had been young and in love and were planning to get married.22 Emon responds: Malgre sa, ou touye Antigòn, ‘Despite all that, you killed Antigòn’ (64). At this bald statement, Kreyon seems eager to distinguish his culpability from that of his mèt tèt as he asks: Se ak papa w, w ap pale, oubyen avèk lwa nan tèt papa w?, ‘Are you speaking with your father or with the lwa in your father’s head?’ (64). Emon confirms that he is speaking with his father, insisting that the responsibility for Antigòn’s death rests with the king, regardless of the involvement of his mèt tèt. If the Vwa Govi shows from the beginning of the play that Kreyon has been controlled by his mèt tèt for the last fourteen years, this prompts the audience to wonder who, exactly, this mèt tèt might be, and this becomes an issue of great importance for Kreyon as well. Later, as he continues to search for an explanation for

172  Antigòn in West Africa his condition, Izmèn mentions to him that Tirezyas had claimed that a lwa had been ‘dancing’ on his head during this period and had just allowed the king to recover his faculties recently: Li te di tout moun lwa k ap danse nan tèt ou denpri 14 an an, li gan pou l ba w yon kanpo, ‘[Tirezyas] told everyone that a lwa has been dancing on your head for 14 years, and he is giving you a break’ (67). This understandably prompts Kreyon to ask which lwa had been doing this, and Izmèn responds dismissively that Tirezyas does not know, but that pèp la di se yon dyab (‘the people say it is a dyab,’ 67). Kreyon had used this same word, dyab, in Antigòn when he was wondering how Antigòn could have been apprehended burying her brother’s corpse (23). In a Christian context, dyab can mean demon or even Satan, but within a Vodou context it implies a wild, hot and insatiable spirit. The people, that is, sense that Kreyon’s/Papa Doc’s violence derives from a voracious supernatural source. Kreyon seems stunned, and Izmèn adds the further detail that although she does not know which spirit this is, se yon lwa ki jalou e ki engra, ‘it is a jealous and ungrateful lwa’ (68). Kreyon soon has the chance to confront Tirezyas about this lwa or dyab that is his mèt tèt. The king asks his houngan to close his eyes and describe what he sees. After some delay, Tirezyas does so and tells Kreyon that he sees nothing at all. Kreyon cannot believe this and demands more. Tirezyas says that he sees Anyen. Fènwa nèt. Nwa kou lank. (‘Nothing. Complete darkness. Black as ink,’ 69). Kreyon wonders what this might mean, and Tirezyas says that he is no longer speaking with the king. In a moment that could provide wonderfully horrific theatrics, Kreyon insists that he is still present, even as the houngan knows that se lwa a k tounen (‘the lwa has returned’). Kreyon demands to know which lwa this is, and after reiterating the point made earlier by the Vwa Govi and Izmèn, that this is the lwa that had ‘danced upon his head’ (danse nan tèt ou) for the last fourteen years, Kreyon provides the clearest clue about the identity of Kreyon’s mèt t èt: Se pa lwa Nanchon Nago. Se lwa Petro (‘This is not a lwa of the Nanchon Nago. This is a Petro lwa,’ 69). A nanchon is a branch (or ‘nation’ or ‘family’) of Vodou spirits and rituals. In many cases a nanchon corresponds to a specific West African people or place, such as the nanchon Rada (Dahomian), nanchon Kongo (Bantu), and nanchon Nago (Yorùbá). The Petro lwa are ‘hot’, highly dynamic and often vengeful, most often in contrast to the cooler and calmer spirits of the Rada tradition. But the Petro lwa are also unusual in that they, despite traits that can be traced back to African sources, seem to have taken on recognizable form not in Africa but in the colonial Saint-Domingue.23 When Tirezyas claims that Kreyon is being controlled by a Petro, rather than a Nago, lwa, Morisseau-Leroy may be suggesting to his audience (especially his West African and Haitian audiences) that the abuses of Duvalierism cannot be blamed on the Yorùbá Nago or any such African connection but must be explained in terms of a locally Haitian influence. Much as Morisseau-Leroy had said in interviews that one message of Antigòn is that the people of Haiti can chose their own spiritual powers, we can see in this opposition between Petro and Nago a condemnation of what Duvalierism has done to Vodou and Haiti.

Antigòn in West Africa  173 Returning to the confrontation between Kreyon and Tirezyas, it now becomes clear that Kreyon’s voice is no longer his own but, as the houngan had said, that of his mèt tèt. Tirezyas predicts violence and danger, and the lwa responds by taunting Tirezyas for his inability to identify Kreyon’s mèt tèt: Tout tan toulede je w yo pa pete nèt, ou pap janm wè plis pase lòt moun wè, ‘as long as your two eyes are not completely closed, you will never see more than others see’ (70). At this point, Kreyon attacks Tirezyeas, and while the two engage, the Vwa Govi and Vwa Onsi yo chant frenzied invocations to various spirits, culminating with all voices praying: pinga nou kite lwa touye nou, ‘don’t let the lwa kill us!’ (72). At this point, Tirezyas escapes, and Kreyon, now fully under the power of his mèt tèt, summons Filo, explains that he wants to feel what it is like to kill a friend, and executes Filo, who accepts his fate without comment or complaint even after learning that he has been singled out for death, paradoxically, because of his loyalty and devotion. This is the culminating moment of Kreyon’s role on stage, and it transitions into the theme of transferring not only power but also the violent mèt tèt from father to son. In the aftermath of Filo’s death, Tirezyas returns to the stage and Kreyon asks that the houngan forget their earlier strife. He now has a new agenda, and he asks for help with something shocking: Mèt tèt chwal mwen, ki pèmèt li kenbe pandan 14 an an, m vle w wete l nan tèt chwal mwen pou mete l nan tèt Emon, ‘My horse’s mèt tèt, which let him hold on for fourteen years – I want you to take it out of my horse’s head and put it into Emon’s’ (76). Tirezyas reacts with a combination of surprise and horror: Desounen menm? Fò chwal la mouri . . . se lè chwal la mouri yo fè sa, ‘You mean the desounen? But the horse must be dead . . . you only do this when the horse is dead’ (76). The desounen is a ritual done after someone has died, and Maya Deren describes it as the moment when the both the gwobonanj and the mèt tèt are separated from the body (1970, 44–45). Thus, Tirezyas is understandably confused when Kreyon, or more accurately his mèt tèt, asks for this ritual while the king is still alive. Since this is not a ceremony to be performed on the living, it is not clear what the implications are for Kreyon, as we can see in the confused response of Tirezyas: M pa janm wè sa . . . M pa wè ki jan pou sa fèt, ‘I have never seen such a thing . . . I don’t see how it can be done’ (76). It is uncertain whether we should expect that Kreyon will be left dead or freed from his mèt tèt. What is clear, however, is that Morisseau-Leroy uses this ritual as a way to emphasize the continuity of violence between Kreyon and Emon within the play and between Papa Doc and Baby Doc in Haitian historical reality. After some further hesitation on the part of Tirezyas, Kreyon’s mèt tèt finally ends all arguments, and Tirezyas performs the desounen. Mambo Lasirèn sings two songs, after which Tirezyas calls upon various lwa and asks that the mèt tèt leave Kreyon’s head and enter Emon’s. In quick succession, Kreyon, Emon and Eredis each says Abobo!, a standard Vodou exclamation to ratify and acknowledge what has taken place. Tirezyas hands Kreyon’s gun, with which he had recently killed Filo, to Emon and formally introduces him as chèf Tèb avi, ‘leader of Tèb for life’ (79). Ritually invested with his father’s mèt tèt, politically empowered in his father’s office, and holding the gun as the symbol of his father’s reign of terror,

174  Antigòn in West Africa Emon’s first action is to shoot Tirezyas. As the houngan dies, he cries out: Nou pa wè se yon fanmi ki gen madichon, ‘We do not see that this family is cursed’ (80). The chubby boy who, earlier in the play, had explicitly and emphatically declared that he did not want to become the next leader of Tèb, has immediately replicated his father’s indiscriminate violence. Through this dramatized sequence in which violence is perpetrated and ritually transferred from father to son, Morisseau-Leroy effects a uniquely Haitian narrative that parallels the doomed or cursed family of Oedipus. The Theban royal family repeatedly found itself in situations in which divine pronouncements chafed against natural human tendencies. Oedipus’ father, Laius, had received an oracle saying that he should not have a son, since the son would one day kill him.24 A king needs an heir, and the idea of a king choosing not to have a son presents a strange scenario according to ancient Greek norms, and so Laius inevitably fathers a son: Oedipus. In an effort to avoid his fate, Laius orders the child to be killed, but, as we learn in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, that order was disobeyed and the child was taken in secret to be raised by the king and queen of Corinth, who did not have a child. This narrative pattern repeats itself in the next generation when the young Oedipus, unaware that he is not the biological son of his Corinthian parents, receives an oracle that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Like Laius, Oedipus tries to escape his doom, though the divine injunctions are inverted, since Laius was told not to do something completely natural, whereas Oedipus learns that he will, regardless of his desires, do something a-social and unnatural. Hoping to defy his fate, Oedipus vows never to return to Corinth and travels to Thebes. On the way he kills a man whom he does not recognize but who is, of course, Laius. When he arrives to Thebes, the people, now bereft of their king, offer him the kingship and the hand of their Queen Jocasta, who is, of course, his mother. Both Laius and Oedipus try to avoid their fates but precipitate their own downfalls through their efforts. One is left to wonder: in what sort of a cosmos does divine power issue such proclamations which seem less to foresee than to facilitate future outcomes. Had Apollo remained silent would Oedipus have grown up in Thebes without incident? With the oracles of Laius and Oedipus fulfilled only after the latter had fathered four children with his mother-wife Jocasta, the story continues with Oedipus cursing his sons in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, because their eagerness for the kingship has pitted them against each other and left them with no concern for their father, now wandering blind and in exile. Oedipus’ curse leads to the events reinterpreted by Morisseau-Leroy in Antigòn, in which the sons kill each other in the fight to control Thebes/Tèb, and Antigone/Antigòn is left to decide how to react to the edict of Creon/Kreyon about the corpse of her brother. In Wa Kreyon, Tirezyas’ dying words about the curse upon Kreyon’s family, thus, activate a torrent of connections with Greek stories, but their primary resonance remains Haitian. The family of Kreyon is obviously and intentionally modeled on the Duvalier family, which projects an identity rooted in both a perversely violent form of noirisme and a narrow adherence to Vodou as a form of political control. Trouillot described Papa Doc’s regime as enforcing a ‘new kind of state violence’ (1990, 166), an idea which is now usefully analyzed in terms of Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics (2003, 2019), itself a revision of Foucault’s

Antigòn in West Africa  175 and (building on Foucault) Agamben’s idea of biopolitics. Kreyon’s killing of Filo, which Morisseau-Leroy framed as an example of intentionally random violence, and Emon’s similar killing of Tirezyas as the founding act of his ascendency encapsulate the idea of necropolitics. Father and son commit parallel acts of violence that map out a politics structured through the production of death. In this vein, Erica James describes the elder Duvalier as ‘the most notorious’ example of a necropolitical regime (2010, 57). And lest one suspect that scholars of Duvalier exaggerate for emphasis, Mbembe himself has characterized the worst excesses of post-colonial African governments as a ‘lapse into “tonton-macoutism” ’ (2001, 83), evoking Duvalier’s feared paramilitary forces as a virtual synonym for the necropolitical machine.25 Seen in this perspective, Tirezyas’ claim that the family of Kreyon is cursed draws clear attention to the manner in which Morisseau-Leroy has hacked the ancient Greek story patterns. The Greek myths about the family of Oedipus (and Creon) are not necropolitical, but they turn on narratives in which humans seem to be cursed either through divine pronouncements or via antagonism within the family. Morisseau-Leroy pivots on the idea of a curse and reframes Kreyon’s family in terms of necropolitical violence. Conclusion: The Tropical Caligula

If the ancient Greek mythical cycle associated with the family of Oedipus and Antigone did not emphasize necropolitical themes, a different point of contact between Haiti and the Greco-Roman past does. Various critics (some writing before Mbembe had coined the term ‘necropolitics’ but connecting with its core ideas nonetheless) have aligned the necropolitical strategies of Duvalierism with those of imperial Rome. For example, René Depestre (b. 1926), an author and activist who left Haiti in 1959 to resist Duvalier and support the communist revolution in Cuba, described Papa Doc as a ‘tropical Caligula’ (1969, 7). The historical realities about Caligula, the third Roman emperor who ruled from 37–41 CE, are poorly understood, since it is widely agreed that the sources of information for his reign are deeply biased, but he exists in popular imagination as a paragon of an unhinged ruler who used violence capriciously in order to cow his subjects into compliance.26 An important turning point in the popular understanding of Caligula’s reign came with Camus’ play Caligula, the script of which was first published in 1944 and which debuted in Paris in 1945. Camus hacked his vision of Caligula from the historical record to speak to the realities of mid-twentieth century Europe, and in his version the emperor exercises violence around him in a misguided quest to find a kind of solitary and misanthropic freedom. It may be that Depestre had this version of Caligula in mind in his description of Duvalier as a ‘tropical Caligula’, but Danticat explicitly connects the dots in her account, pieced together from conversations with her family, about a book club in Port-au-Prince reading scenes of Camus’ play as a form of resistance to Duvalierism (as discussed in more detail in Chapter 9). Indeed the very title of her collection of essays, Create Dangerously, is taken from Camus and becomes, through her reflections on Haitian art and history, a call to arms to resist Duvalierist-style necropolitics in any context through creative and activist engagements with the arts.

176  Antigòn in West Africa It is unclear to what extent necropolitical strategies were employed or even considered in ancient Rome, and, as noted above, our understanding of Caligula’s reign may be rooted in unreliable sources. Yet ancient writers were certainly able to parallel Camus’ literary achievement of imagining necropolitical scenarios. In an essay on the applicability of biopolitical theories to ancient Greece, I used the term bio-poetics as a way of approaching such situations (Hawkins 2018), and the possibility exists in this discussion for a kind of necro-poetics that explores necropolitical fantasies. Andrew McClellan suggests precisely this in his analysis of Lucan’s Pharsalia (also known as Bellum Civile or The Civil War), an epic poem about the Roman civil war between the forces of Julius Caesar and Pompey. Lucan enjoyed great success under Nero (ruled 54–68 CE), but he soon came into conflict with the emperor and was forced to commit suicide at the age of twenty-five with his epic unfinished. McClellan is quick to acknowledge the thoroughly privileged life that Lucan led, but by shifting from historical realities to literary projections, he argues that Lucan fosters ‘a conceptual view of Neronian Rome that strikingly mirrors Mbembe’s postcolonial death-world’ (2020, 229).27 Lucan rooted his necropolitical description of the confrontation between Caesar and Pompey in his perception of Nero’s imperial excesses, even as his own relationship with the emperor eroded, much as Camus’ Caligula must be understood in relation to the European deathscape of World War II. In much the same way, Morisseau-Leroy uses the narrative space of both the Greek mythological tradition and his specific intervention in that tradition with Antigòn to create a necro-poetic parallel to the necropolitical realities of Duvalierism.28 By the 1978 publication of Wa Kreyon (whenever it was composed), François Duvalier was dead and gone, having died of heart disease in 1971, and Baby Doc would remain in power until his ouster in 1986. But if Duvalierism had not yet come to an end, Morisseau-Leroy’s play nonetheless conjures an epoch-closing atmosphere that pairs with Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. The latter play, posthumously staged in 401 BCE, is regularly read in terms of the old playwright offering his final thoughts on the old Oedipus. By 1978 Morisseau-Leroy was still in the prime of his career, but if Sophocles was saying farewell to Athens and Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus, then Morisseau-Leroy was doing something similar in Wa Kreyon. His Kreyon of Antigòn had only coincidentally pre-figured the rise of Duvalier, but that connection became unavoidable and undeniable in the 1959 performances in Paris and in the 1963 Ghanaian staging, as well as in his Antigòn poem from 1972. As Morisseau-Leroy became a diasporic author, Kreyon morphed into Papa Doc. This relationship drew in Morisseau-Leroy himself as both playwright and actor. As a playwright, the originally accidental connection between Kreyon and Duvalier called out for a more intentional engagement. And as an actor, MorisseauLeroy had already linked himself to Tirezyas, by performing that role in several versions of Antigòn. Indeed, the elder Morisseau-Leroy seems to have played up his affinity for the seer in his self-presentation. In a 1996 interview, Judy Cantor described his appearance in this way: ‘His pale, almost translucent pupils give him a mystical countenance, like that of a tribal wise man incarnating sacred spirits’ (Cantor 1996). In this way, the tension between Tirezyas and Kreyon in Antigòn could be seen in terms of the relationship between Morisseau-Leroy and Duvalier, at least in the performances after his departure from Haiti in 1959. With Wa

Antigòn in West Africa  177 Kreyon, then, Morisseau-Leroy not only says goodbye to Kreyon, but he also punctuates the career of the elder Duvalier and his own forced estrangement from Haiti when Emon (‘Baby Doc’) executes Tirezyas, Morisseau-Leroy’s stage persona. Morisseau-Leroy never intended Wa Kreyon to be a sequel to Antigòn in any simplistic sense. It is, rather, an original work that writes-back both to the theatrical canon and to his own Antigòn, and the play hacks the myth of the family of Oedipus in order to voice a diasporic condemnation of Duvalierism and necropolitical oppression. In this way Morisseau-Leroy creates a king of neoclassical drama, but only if that term is understood as rejecting the narrow neoclassicism of Winckelmann and Lessing, who found in ancient Greek art a purity and sublimity that fed into Euro-U.S. strictures of white supremacy.29 Morisseau-Leroy’s neoclassicism is equally at home in Haiti, West Africa and France, and it is doubly (perhaps exponentially) diasporic in that it emerges from expansive thinking about ancient Greece as a descendant of Pharaonic Egypt, as the vehicle of Alexander the Great’s imperial conquests, as the educational foundation of European colonization across the globe, as one strand of the post-colonial cultural flourishings in Haiti, Ghana, and Senegal, and as a response to Morisseau-Leroy’s estrangement from his homeland. Beyond this, as I will show in the next chapter, Morisseau-Leroy’s fascination with the family of Antigone transcended his own career and offered a point of reference for later authors working within the global Haitian diaspora. Much as Sophocles came back to the family of Oedipus at different stages of his career, so too did Morisseau-Leroy return to the figure Kreyon. Read from the perspective of Greek mythology, Wa Kreyon offers a wholly new twist on the family’s history by taking up a question that hangs over the conclusion of the Sophoclean Antigone, namely, what would become of Creon in the aftermath of so much death? Morisseau-Leroy offers one answer by suggesting that the trauma of losing niece, son and wife on the same day drove Creon to a breakdown that left him with major gaps in his memory and an amoral affinity for violence that eventually spurred him to execute the loyal Filo without any shred of justification. But such an effort to think primarily from the perspective of Greek mythology or in terms of the Sophoclean narrative is inherently blinkered. The play can only be understood in its fullest context by experiencing it in terms of Morisseau-Leroy’s exile, his fascination with the ways that his Antigòn could be radically reconceived to respond to changed circumstances, his expression of Haitian identity through Vodou and Creole, and the Duvalierism so brutally oppressing Haiti throughout this era. Whereas Sophocles, at the end of his career, brought back the old and purified figure of Oedipus in his Oedipus at Colonus as a gift to Athens, Morisseau-Leroy returned to the figure of Kreyon/Papa Doc at the moment of his death and the ascendency of the disinterested Emon/Baby Doc as a warning about the dynastic oppression holding down the people of Haiti. Notes 1 Significant but not necessarily revolutionary. Gibbs 2009, 41–42, notes that Antigone was staged in 1956 at both the Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast, Ghana (where Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite would premier his version of the Antigone myth, Odale’s Choice, in 1962) and at the Kumasi College of Technology.

178  Antigòn in West Africa 2 James 1963, 396–398, makes the bold claim that independence movements across Africa were catalyzed primarily by West Indians, and he points to the Jamaican Marcus Garvey and Trinidadian George Padmore. 3 Gérard Chenet (b. 1927), a poet, journalist, architect and activist, moved to Guinea in 1958 but relocated to Dakar in 1962 because of the dictatorial turn of Sekou Touré’s government. Jean-Fernand Brièrre (1909–1992), a poet, playwright and diplomat, was jailed by Duvalier and upon his release in 1961 he went to Jamaica and then to Dakar in 1964. Actress Jacqueline Scott-Lemoine (1923–2011) left Haiti for Paris in 1962 and relocated permanently to Dakar after initially coming to perform in the African debut of Césaire’s Tragedy of King Christophe in April 1966. For more on these and other Haitians in Dakar in this era, see Gouraige 1974; Dorsinville 1980. 4 Gibbs 2009, 26–27; Morisseau-Leroy 1983 assembles references to some of MorisseauLeroy’s work in this direction in Ghana and, to a lesser extent, in Senegal. For example, not only was Antigòn restaged in English, but his Anatol was performed in Ghana as Kweku and in Senegal as Doodoo. 5 Volumes 3 and 4 appeared in 1983 and 1990, respectively. The entire collection is available in Creole as Morisseau-Leroy 1990. 6 Citations in Creole follow the 1990 edition with my translation, which has benefitted greatly from the corrections and feedback of Matthew Robertshaw. 7 The Creole prefix ti- is cognate with French petit and means ‘little’, marking any Creole name beginning with ti- as a diminutive. In this case, Antigone becomes Antigòn, which become Ti-gon. Creole gon means ‘hinge’, so in its fullest explication, her name could now imply that she is the ‘little hinge’ of revolutionary change. 8 Wa Kreyon is difficult to pin down. The title is alternately spelled Wa Kreyon and, via earlier orthography, Roua Kréon, and it is frequently confused with Antigòn, in which cases it appears with a publication date of 1953, which is clearly incorrect. It was published as Roua Kréon ak Pep-la (‘King Creon’ and ‘The People’) in 1978 (Jaden Kreyol or Jadenkréyol) in Dakar. Robertshaw’s unpublished biography of Morisseau-Leroy (generously shared with me via personal communication) claims that Morisseau-Leroy began developing Wa Kreyon before he left Haiti and in direct response to Duvalier’s theft of the corpse of Clément Jumelle. I have not been able to determine when or if the play was ever staged. Pep-la is the third piece of Morisseau-Leroy’s theatrical trilogy about Antigone’s family, and it presents a scenario in which Izmen (Ismene), Emon (Haemon) and Eredis (Eurydice) are alive after the deaths of Antigòn and Kreyon. I here focus exclusively on Wa Kreyon (using the text and orthography of Morisseau-Leroy 1997), since Morisseau-Leroy himself has emphasized the importance of this play, but I plan to publish a translation and discussion of all three plays in the future. 9 Hameed and Abd-Aun (2016) include Morisseau-Leroy in their study of African playwrights who engage with the myth of Antigone, which they analyze through concepts of ‘de-familiarization’ and ‘re-familiarization’. Curiously, they claim that Antigone in Haiti, the title that Gibbs gives to the 1963 English translation of Antigòn by Mary Dorkonou, was composed (rather than translated) in Ghana in 1963. The dynamics of reception, translation and re-performance contribute to the critics’ power to present this diasporic re-staging of Antigòn as though it were a wholly new play. Although Antigòn was born in Haiti and followed Morisseau-Leroy into exile in Ghana, Wa Kreyon can be analyzed as an originally African, West African or Senegalese play. In addition to Morisseau-Leroy’s work, Hameed and Abd-Aun include Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice (1962), Fugard’s The Island (1973), Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone (1994), and Sabata Sesiu’s Giants (composed 2000, performed 2001). 10 For the idea of necropolitics, or a politics of death, see Mbembe 2019. 11 Reviews in Le National (July 27, 1953) and Haiti-Journal (July 20, 1953). 12 For this phenomenon, see Leader 1997. 13 The plot of this play is summarized by Hyginus, a Latin author who worked for the Emperor Augustus (Fabulae 72).

Antigòn in West Africa  179 14 Creon’s first speech in Sophocles’ Antigone draws heavily on the ‘ship of state’ metaphor to emphasize that he, as helmsman, has steered Thebes through the storm that was the civil war between Eteocles and Polynices (162–210). 15 Racine-Toussaint 2004, 54 discusses Marie-Denise Duvalier in terms of the tradition of politically powerful women in Haiti, whereas the focus of von Tanzelmann 2011, 372–373 is on Cold War politics throughout the region. Racine-Toussaint asserts that Marie-Denise was the better choice to succeed their father, but that the country would not have easily accepted a female president. 16 Dubois 2012, 339–340, claims that Barbot’s release in 1963 came after eighteen months in prison. Maximally, then, Barbot controlled Haiti from May 24, 1959 until November 1961 or about two and a half years. 17 An early template for the ‘Duvalier flag’ can be seen on the cover of Denis and Duvalier 1948. That image featured a flag with black (left) and red (right) background panels and, at center, a pintade (guinea fowl, symbol of the Duvalier revolution) on a conch shell in the center. This image, in turn, looks back to the black and red flag adopted by Dessalines (and used by Christophe) in 1805. The ‘Duvalier flag’ retains the central image of the Haitian coat of arms that appears on the modern Haitian flag but replaced the blue (top) and red (bottom) background with the vertical black and red panels of the book cover. 18 The govi, as introduced in the previous chapter, is a ritual vessel into which a lwa can be welcomed and from which it can speak. The onsi (ounsi in updated orthography) are the devotees who serve the lwa beneath the rank of oungan and manbo. 19 Translations prepared by Guilene Fiéfié and me. 20 As described by Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2003, 118 and endorsed by Strongman 2008, 10. 21 Thus, the issue of personal responsibility, shared between the ‘horse’ and the mèt tèt, is something like the concept of ‘double motivation’ or ‘double determinsim’ often adduced in scholarship on Homer and ancient Athenian tragedy. Judith Fletcher, in speaking about tragic narratives about the family of Oedipus, describes double determinism as ‘an alignment of human choice and supernatural force’ (2021, 33). See Pelliccia 2011. 22 This point rests rather awkwardly in terms of the harmonization of Antigòn and the timeline of Wa Kreyon. If Emon/Baby Doc takes power at the age of nineteen, then this amorous Emon recalled by Kreyon after fourteen years would have been only five. 23 Hurbon (1995, 71) claims that the Petro lwa ‘mostly come from the colony of SaintDomingue itself’ and describes them as ‘Creole lwa’. 24 As per the most familiar version of this myth preserved by Apollodorus (Library, 3.5.7). 25 Note that Mbembe’s statement about tonton-macoutism was made before he had begun to speak of necropolitics. Nevertheless, his description seems to map onto necropolitics avant le mot. 26 E.g. Ambrose 2008 begins his study of tyrannical political leaders with Caligula. Yet the image of Caligula that arises from updated specialist studies, such as Winterling 2011, largely explain away the most famously salacious moments in Caligula’s reign, leaving a portrait of a leader who may have been inept or cruel at times but who was neither unhinged nor arbitrarily violent. 27 Quint 1993 had already framed Lucan’s epic as a strong contrast to Virgil’s Aeneid inasmuch as the former is the epic of the vanquished, whereas the latter is that of the victor. 28 Munro 2015 has argued that Papa Doc Duvalier was and remains today a difficult, if not impossible, figure to represent artistically. Duvalier’s violence created enveloping silences, paradoxical examples of forgetting, and a persistent sense of haunting. MorisseauLeroy perhaps engages in this pattern of not representing Duvalier through his choice to present Duvalierism via characters from Greek mythology. The case of Wa Kreyon, however, seems so obvious as to constitute an exception to the pattern Munro traces. 29 For an updated discussion of neoclassical aesthetics, see Fitzgerald 2022.

8

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ Dany Laferrière’s Le cri des oiseaux fous (2000)

Antigones Antagonise, that is what they tend to do.

– Caroline Rooney

As she was drafting her manuscript about the Eurocentrism of post-colonial theory, Caroline Rooney developed a deep study of the myth of Antigone. Early in her analysis of this young woman who stubbornly refuses to change her stance, Rooney relates a small frustration of her own that led to a surprising insight. She tells how her computer’s spell-checker, which, like Antigone, could not be deterred in its persistence, automatically changed every appearance of the plural Antigones into the verb antagonise (2000, 33). After many rounds of this back-and-forth, Rooney hacked her spell-checker’s obduracy by embracing the message that the algorithm kept robotically producing. ‘Antigones antagonise.’ This hybrid human-AI collocation playfully frames this chapter, in which a novel by Dany Laferrière, coincidentally published in the same year as Rooney’s study, wrestles with the weight of the Antigone-tradition. Traditions serve as a kind of cultural algorithm – a societal spell-checker, as it were – that generate momentum for the production of normativity. But artists and intellectuals, like Rooney and Laferrière, bring such dynamics into the foreground of our thinking in order to reveal, critique and productively antagonize our relationship to such normative patterns. Dany (né, Windsor Klébert) Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953, the same year that Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn debuted at the Rex Theatre in the Haitian capital. This coincidence of time and space begins a pas-de-deux between authors separated by a generation but bound together by literary and historical forces. Most critically for this chapter, Laferrière draws upon Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn in his Le cri des oiseaux fous (2000, ‘The Cry of Mad Birds’) as a primary interpretive motif and as a model for blending Greek mythology and Vodou, particularly through the figure of Legba, the lwa who mediates between worlds.1 Throughout his corpus Laferrière engages a dizzying array of literary, cultural and historical contexts, but with Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn he establishes a clear and self-conscious literary tradition by aligning his novel with both Morisseau-Leroy and Sophocles.2 DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-12

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  181 After analyzing his hacking of the myth of Antigone, I show how he pairs her, heroically standing against oppression, with Odysseus, the wandering hero always seeking his way home. These mythical characters are compelling for Laferrière’s diasporic work, since they represent alternative responses to Duvalierism and, more sweepingly, any crisis: staying to face death or leaving on a quest for (a new) home. The pairing of these models is tightly interwoven in Le cri . . . , but at the end of the chapter I show briefly how Laferrière returns to the Odysseus motif in different ways in l’Énigme du retour (2009, The Enigma of the Return, 2011). These variations build upon the already long list of Caribbean authors who have hacked the myth of Odysseus in a host of different ways.3 Laferrière’s Autofictional Style Before looking at any text or presenting further biographical information about Lafferière it will be helpful to say something about his style, which Alvina Ruprecht has described in terms of jazz improvisation (1995, 260). Nearly all his many novels amount to slices of an overarching, autofictional biography of a life presented from the perspective of a narrator (sometimes ‘I’, sometimes Vieux Os or ‘Old Bones’, a nickname given to Laferrière by his grandmother), who almost but never quite amounts to an autobiographical reflection of the author himself. Each novel draws the reader into a period of Laferrière’s life, while the autofictional strategies of narration constantly destabilize autobiographical connections. Already in his first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985, How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired, 1987), this issue is explicitly interwoven into the text. The narrator of that book, a black writer from the Caribbean living on meagre means in a shared apartment in Montreal while he works on his first novel, has a dream that his novel about just such a character will become a huge success. In a televised interview, he (the dreaming narrator) is asked if everything in his novel (which the narrator has not actually finished yet) really happened, to which the narrator coyly replies ‘pure coincidence’ (145–146).4 Much like his character within the novel, Laferrière’s first novel was a great success, and – again, just like his narrator – he has frequently fielded similar questions in actual interviews about the relationship between his biography and that of his characters. In one recent exchange about that first novel, Laferrière described his approach in terms that capture the elan and feigned off-handedness (Horace’s simplex munditiis) of Comment faire l’amour . . . : ‘I saw it as being in the vein of Basquiat. At first, it just seems like graffiti – but then you see all the traces of Western culture within the images . . . as though Picasso were tagging with spray paint’ (Gollner 2017). Speaking more generally about his novels in an earlier interview, he put it this way: ‘I don’t recount only my personal adventures – I also include those of my buddies. The narrator represents a bunch of people. That’s the way you write a novel, with a number of lives.’ (Coates 1999, 912). In yet another context he framed the issue somewhat differently: ‘When I talk about my books, I always say that they are an autobiography of my feelings’ (Larrier 2006, 22). With historical realities and the idiosyncratic filter of personal recollections always blending

182  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ and blurring in his works, Lee Skallerup Besette captures the spirit of his style by noting that ‘emotion fuels the recreation of reality’ for Laferrière (2013, 17). In the pages ahead, I will speak in passing of various novels in terms of their relationship to Laferrière’s biography, but each text will, to varying degrees, conform to or blur beyond that historical and autofictional biography. In addition to the careful construction of the narrating voice, which students of ancient Greek literature may find similar to the strategies of narration used by Lucian of Samosata (discussed briefly in Chapter 2), Laferrière’s novels are always deeply engaged with literary, and more broadly artistic, cultural production. This aspect of his writing is less pronounced in books such as L’odeur du café (1991, An Aroma of Coffee, 1993), which depicts a period of Laferrière’s childhood when he was living in Petit-Goâve with his grandmother, Da, or La chair du maître (1997, ‘The Master’s Flesh’), a collection of short-stories about women from the U.S. who visit Haiti for the purposes of sex tourism. But in those novels that treat periods of Laferrière’s adult life, Old Bones regularly views and engages with the world around him through the story-worlds of the books that he keeps within reach. In L’énigme du retour, for example, the narrator spends much of his time with Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, and in Je suis un écrivain japonaise (2008, I am a Japanese Writer, 2010), he reads and re-reads the poetry of Matsuo Basho (often while taking long baths). Le cri des oiseaux fous exemplifies this latter group as it follows Laferrière through his last day in Haiti in 1976. His father (also named Windsor Klébert) had already departed Haiti in 1959 (the same year that Morisseau-Leroy went into exile), because of the oppressive regime of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, and Old Bones experienced his ‘first exile’ (premier exil, 50), being sent to live with his grandmother in Petit-Goâve to avoid the political dangers of Port-au-Prince. But by 1976, the younger Laferrière was working as a journalist under the brutality of the younger Duvalier. When his dear friend and fellow journalist Gasner Raymond was found murdered on the beach, obviously assassinated for his political involvements by the Tonton Macoute on orders from ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, Laferrière decided to follow his father into exile. Since then, he has lived in Canada and the U.S., and his literary career has moved from success to success, earning accolades and prestigious international awards (including the Prix Médicis for L’énigme du retour in 2009) and becoming an Immortal of the Académie français in 2013. Antigone and Tradition in Le cri des oiseaux fous Le cri . . . begins with a pair of epigraphs that frame the novel. First, a dedication to his friend: ‘To my friend Gasner Raymond, whose death changed my life’ (À mon ami Gasner Raymond/dont la mort a changé ma vie.) Then, on the following page, three lines in French translation from Sophocles’ Antigone (line 523–25): Antigone: I was made to share my love, not my hate. Creon: Then go below and, if you must love, love the dead.5

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  183 These epigraphs bring together life and death in provocative ways. What does it mean for a friend’s death to change one’s life? How should we construe Creon’s injunction to ‘love the dead’? And how do these epigraphs interact? Is Gasner, a corpse before the opening scene, positioned to play the part of Polyneices, Antigone’s already dead and unburied brother?6 Or is he an Antigone, whose death must somehow be the lynchpin of the tragic catharsis that should, according to Aristotle, change the lives of those who experience this drama from a safe distance? As we will see, Laferrière is more interested in multiplying possibilities than in zeroing in on definitive (and, thereby, reductive) answers to such questions.7 As an example of this multiplication of connections, Amy Ransom has already shown that even as Laferrière engages the myth of Antigone from the start, through the ethical demands of Gasner’s unburied corpse, he is also playing Oedipal games with his own family (2013, passim). Laferrière, who goes by Dany, was named after his father Windsor Klébert at birth. The elder Laferrière initially supported the rise of François Duvalier, even serving as mayor of Port-au-Prince from 1957 to 1959, but he soon split with the increasingly dictatorial Duvalier and left Haiti to live the rest of his life in New York.8 Because of his father’s political prominence, it was safer for the young Laferrière to embrace a nickname, and he has gone by Dany ever since. Early in Le cri . . . father and son, who share both a name and the experience of leaving Haiti because of a Duvalier, begin to blur together: ‘The thing is . . . I look a lot like my dad, and sometimes I think that my mom has a hard time telling the difference between him and me.’9 In the mind of Marie Nelson Laferrière the two men appear about the same age, since her husband in 1959 (when she saw him for the last time) was about the same age as her son in 1976. Oedipal stories always turn on a confusion of familial roles precipitated by some external force, such as Apolline prophecy in the Greek myth or, in the case of the Laferrière family, the Duvalier regime. Together with the coincidence of names and similarity of physiques, this leads to an interchangability of father and son.10 But if the chaos resulting from ominous prophecies led the Greek Oedipus to marry his mother and have four children with her, including Antigone, then the Haitian situation is as different as it is similar. Two generations of Duvaliers have driven away two generations of Laferrières, leaving Marie, more an Antigone than a Jocasta, doubly bereft. Marie’s conflation of the two men with the same name, the same look, and the same antagonist (though the oppressive Duvalier, too, has shifted from père to fils), also begins a meditation on the (im)possibility of change. Is 1976 a repeat of 1959, the year when both the elder Laferrière and MorisseauLeroy left Haiti, the year when Jumelle’s funeral made Morisseau-Leroy think more precisely about the connections between Papa Doc and Kreyon? Are father and son (whether Lafferière or Duvalier) not also significantly dissimilar? And do artists return to Antigone, because she is equally relevant or differently relevant in new historical contexts? Perhaps there is always a Duvalier-Creon (a collocation that Laferrière uses later in Le cri . . . , 216), an idealized Antigone to resist, and a real-world protagonist who wonders how to move toward that ideal without ending up a corpse.

184  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ The tradition (not just the myth) of Antigone comes to the fore in two chapters of Le cri . . . that describe a performance of Antigone’s story. In ‘Le duel (3 h 21)’ (‘The duel (3:21 pm))’, Laferrière introduces a choice between two mises en abyme.11 Old Bones enters the Conservatoire d’art dramatique as two plays are being rehearsed simultaneously, thus presenting him and the novel with a choice. In one hall, actors are working on Musset’s Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée (A Door Must Either Be Open or Shut, 1845), and we hear how rapturously Musset’s works have been adored by generations of Haitian theater-goers. But Old Bones reports that his peers are yearning for something other than Musset’s classically perfect French language, since ‘Most of the time, French is a shackle for us . . .’ (Le français est plutôt un carcan pour nous . . . , 36). The linguistic alternative to Musset’s play awaits in the other hall, where Antigone is being rehearsed. Laferrière builds anticipation for this performance by keeping the doors of the rehearsal hall shut, since the cast is scrambling to train a new Creon. Old Bones’ friend Ézéquiel has stepped in on short notice to fill in for an actor who has been hospitalized with a case of angina pectoris.12 Instead of letting us see the rehearsal where, we might say, choices of staging, casting and performance must either be ‘open or shut’, he conflates different versions of Antigone’s story. The book’s second epigraph had already invoked Sophocles, but here, in the space of one line, Laferrière refers to both ‘Antigone in Creole’ (Antigone en créole), which is the name of Morisseau-Leroy’s play and ‘Sophocles’ play’ (la pièce de Sophocle, 37).13 He explains that Morisseau-Leroy had adapted Sophocles’ play two decades ago on a bet to demonstrate the emotional power and range of Creole. Laferrière, born in the same year as Morisseau-Leroy’s play, says that Old Bones and his peers had formed their thoughts about the world in part through the uniquely Haitian Antigone: ‘For us, the point of reference was not Sophocles but, rather, Morisseau-Leroy, who had set the work of the Greek playwright in the Haitian peasantry, making it meaningful for us. Vodou and the peasantry were all the rage.’14 But, the narrator notes, because Morisseau-Leroy is in exile in Senegal working with Senghor ‘to develop a national theatre’ (à monter un théâtre national) and because of the ‘highly subversive nature’ (son caractère hautement subversif, 38) of his play, Antigòn has not been staged in Haiti since the rise of Duvalier. The play, not performed for so many years but coincidentally returning to the stage on the same day as Gasner’s assassination, surrounds the closed doors of the rehearsal hall with anticipation. The two plays being rehearsed thus create a stark choice between French and Creole language and French and Haitian culture: ‘Musset vs. Morisseau-Leroy’ (Musset face à Morisseau-Leroy, 38). For this reason, the cast of Antigone fears the consequences of a poor showing, because they understand that the performance ‘is important for Creole and Haitian culture’ (C’est important pour le créole et la culture haïtienne, 39). But if Musset represents a stable and purely French option, the alternative is far less clear, since Antigone exists as a tradition that spans historical, cultural and linguistic contexts. Old Bones even takes the unpopular tack of questioning the authenticity of Morisseau-Leroy’s Haitian play by asking what it means for an ancient Greek playwright, filtered through Morisseau-Leroy, to help

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  185 his generation ‘to understand the intricate fabric of power among the Haitian peasantry’ (comprendre les rapports complexes du pouvoir dans la paysannerie haïtienne, 39). To square this circle, he offers a bold hypothesis that harks back towards Price-Mars’ comparison of the peasantries of Haiti and the ancient Mediterranean: ‘Sophocles may have been a Haitian peasant’ (Sophocle était peut-être un paysan haïten, 39), since Sophocles seems to have understood Haitian culture better than does Old Bones. Such thinking wins Old Bones no friends, as his age-mates think his ideas undermine claims to a uniquely Haitian identity. For Laferrière in 2000, composing Le cri . . . after a quarter-century away from Haiti, the valorization of such discrete identities had become impossible, because of the transnational realities of his life. He has dealt with this issue most directly in Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008), a novel that makes one of its major points through its very title. The claim made in the novel by the narrator that ‘I am a Japanese writer’ emerges from Laferrière’s response to questions about whether he is a Haitian writer, a black writer, a Caribbean writer or a French-language writer (and, his narrator adds, the need to give his publisher a title). Instead of embracing any of these options, the narrator, who has been reading Basho obsessively, flips the script entirely: ‘I take on my reader’s nationality. Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I immediately become a Japanese writer’ (14). This leads to all manner of delightful cultural intersections throughout the book, from the revelation that the Icelandic singer Bjork is actually a voodoo doll, to the idea that French kissing exists everywhere except France, to a Greek restauranteur who only hears ‘Play-doh’ at the mention of ‘Plato’. But for Le cri . . . we can turn around the idea of Laferrière becoming a Japanese writer to understand how he embroils Sophocles in this same dynamic of acculturation through reading, writing and translating.15 At the moment when Morisseau-Leroy brought Sophocles’ play into a Haitian context in 1953, even if he had done nothing more than translate the Greek (or French) into Creole, ‘Sophocles too became a Haitian writer’.16 In terms of the role of Antigone within Le cri . . . , Morisseau-Leroy’s transformation of Sophocles into a Haitian writer implies that the 1976 performance is coded as thoroughly Haitian whether Laferrière refers to Morisseau-Leroy or Sophocles at any given moment. The two writers from the past replay the tension between Antigone’s brothers, vying for control (of the narrative and the stage) even as they perfectly mirror each other, thereby making the choice of one over the other less important than might be expected. Yet Laferrière also hints that we readers of Le cri . . . are experiencing a series of superimposed adaptations of Antigone’s story. The description of Morisseau-Leroy’s play as ‘subversive’ is important in this regard, because in 1953 it was not. The choice to present a play in Creole may have been risky in terms of Morisseau-Leroy’s career and reputation, and it may have ruffled the feathers of the Francophile elite, but the play became politically subversive primarily when seen in retrospect after the rise of Papa Doc in 1957 (as discussed in more detail in the previous chapter). Just as Morisseau-Leroy’s performances of Antigòn in 1959 in Paris and 1963 in Accra surely drew obvious comparisons to Duvalier’s regime, so too does Old Bones see Morisseau-Leroy’s

186  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ play as subversive in relation to the Duvalierism that did not yet exist in 1953 but which dominated his life in 1976. For Morisseau-Leroy’s audiences in the late 50’s and 60’s, the Kreyon of Antigòn must have seemed to be a stand-in for Papa Doc Duvalier, but Old Bones and his friends connected Morisseau-Leroy’s Kreyon both with Papa Doc, who had forced Morisseau-Leroy and the elder Laferrière into exile, and with Baby Doc, who was immediately responsible for the death of Gasner and the exile of the younger Laferrière. Before we witness this 1976 performance, Laferrière muses on Antigone one more time. As he processes the death of his friend and the plight of his country, he returns to the impact of her courageous resistance: Isn’t every tragedy necessarily personal, even when it becomes a collective drama? Antigone – it is the personal drama about a young woman named Antigone. When a Tonton Macoute is chasing you with a .38 because of your opinions, is it a personal tragedy or a national tragedy? Who is most in danger, in such a situation, you or your country? These are the kind of riddles that get asked only in poor countries. The Sphinx, in this case, is the dictator.17 The Sphinx that Oedipus confronted symbolized a terrifying external threat to the ancient Greek city of Thebes, but however much the myth suggests that the monster hampered travel and commerce outside the city, the urban space within Thebes remained safe. Laferrière here transforms the external threat of the monstrous Sphinx into the pervasive internal threat of the dictator. This move is reminiscent of Bergeaud’s evocation of the Sphinx at a moment when Remus begins to understand and resist the psychological domination of coloniality, which had led him to view the Colonist as a giant (as discussed in Chapter 2). Whereas Bergeaud’s Remus solves the Sphinx’s riddle by finding his own autonomous personhood within a system of enslavement that sought to reduce him to a living tool, Laferrière’s version of the Sphinx’s riddle is left without a clear answer. How should one respond to the domineering presence of a dictator? Gasner, Ézéquiel and Old Bones each works toward a solution that makes sense to him, but far from validating their choices, the novel never suggests that a clear or definitive answer to the dictatorial Sphinx even exists. Aristotle had argued that experiencing a Greek tragedy should effect a catharsis (literally a ‘purging’ or ‘cleansing’) of the viewer’s soul through the elicitation and vicarious processing of pity and fear. It is easy enough to understand those two emotions in conjunction with Antigone’s story, but the version that Laferrière is building up to brings such reflective aspects of tragedy together with a more muscular and responsive idea of art as political resistance, perhaps something more Brechtian in its denial of catharsis than Aristotelian. Later in the novel, in what could be a nod toward Morisseau-Leroy’s witnessing of Jumelle’s funeral, Old Bones hypothesizes that Sophocles must have witnessed scenes of dictatorial brutality similar to those carried out by the Duvaliers.18 The transhistorical realities of political violence become universal in a way that nearly

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  187 confounds the directionality of time, as if Duvalierism might have provided the inspiration for Sophocles’ play, as if Sophocles or Laferrière is a kind of Antigone for daring to call out such tyrannical behavior. Laferrière’s words move beyond Antigone (and Antigone) as he positions the dictator (perhaps used impersonally to encompass not just the Duvaliers but any dictator) as the riddle-spitting Sphinx of Greek mythology. In this guise, the Sphinx poses challenges for artists and cultural critics (broadly understood), demanding to know whether politically engaged work is worth the danger that such activism entails. In 1976, the performance of Antigone (which, if it is not a complete fiction, must have been planned well before Gasner’s assassination) offers one answer to the riddle of the Duvalierist Sphinx. Laferrière’s Antigone Just as Morisseau-Leroy’s play conveyed different meanings before and after the rise of Papa Doc, so too does the performance recounted in Le cri . . . , in a chapter called ‘Antigone (8:12 pm)’ (Antigone (8 h 12)), become a wholly new artistic event because of the particulars of this performance. Danticat has discussed the role of theatrical performances, even small-scale, clandestine readings, as a kind of political empowerment and opposition in the Duvalier era, and in these pages of Le cri . . . Laferrière constructs a fully realized theatrical version of that phenomenon.19 The hall is packed, and the energy of the audience is more that of a football match than a play. The raucous crowd is united in anticipation of Ézéquiel’s debut and in outrage at Gasner’s murder. Laferrière describes these two young men as rivals within the same social set, like two roosters trying to inhabit a single barnyard. Their rivalry and their different paths of opposing ‘Baby Doc’ – one the corpse on the beach silently calling out for justice, the other playing the part of the tyrant on stage – cast them simultaneously as bi-forms of Antigone, who resists the tyrant, and her brothers, who fought with each other in their struggle to control Thebes. Again, Lafferière puts the spotlight on Morisseau-Leroy as ‘the greatest Haitian Creole poet’ (le plus grand poète haïtien de langue créole, 133) and the man who proved that ‘Creole was able to express every nuance of the human soul’ (que le créole était à même d’exprimer toutes les nuances de l’âme humaine, 133). Yet immediately after lifting up Morisseau-Leroy for all he did and achieved for Creole, Laferrière valorizes the performance over the playwright, as Old Bones notes that he and his peers are most focused on the powerful interaction between the performers and the responsive audience: ‘But for us, we were most impressed by our comrades’ (Mais nous, nous sommes plutôt impressionnés par nos camarades, 133). Within Laferrière’s novel, it is this collective energy, uniting actors on stage and audience members, particularly symbolized by Ézéquiel as an actor just plucked from the audience, that instantiates a new version of Antigone – neither Sophocles’ nor Morisseau-Leroy’s (though both deserve honor and credit) but, rather, Laferrière’s, a Haitian Antigone of 1976 preserved (or wholly fabricated) through the recollections of Laferrière’s autofictional Old Bones. This new Antigone builds on both Sophocles and Morisseau-Leroy, but it comes to life in the mixed temporal frame that is simultaneously Old Bones’ last day in

188  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ Haiti in 1976 and Laferrière’s publication of Le cri .  .  . in 2000 (as well as my own reading of Le cri . . . in the U.S. during Donald Trump’s presidency and the outrage over the killing of George Floyd, another Polyneices not because he was left unburied but because the world watched a police officer slowly choke him to death, thereby putting all of us in the ethical position of Antigone). This new Antigone serves as the Hamlet-like play-within-a-play that informs Le cri . . . , but it is also the spontaneous (even if purely fictional) Antigone of 1976 that is powered by Gasner’s death, by Ézéquiel’s inspired, quasi-improvisational depiction of Creon, and by the looming presence of Baby Doc. This conjuring and multiplication of new versions of Antigone may explain an odd aspect of Laferrière’s novel. For all its praise of the importance of MorisseauLeroy’s play, the quoted passages of the script are French renderings of Sophocles’ Antigone rather than being based on the Creole of Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn (or French translations of that Creole script).20 In limited ways, this Antigone of 1976 is that of Sophocles (the epigraph, the quotations and the distant inspiration) and Morisseau-Leroy (it is nominally his version and seemingly in Creole, despite the Sophoclean excerpts in French), but in the most important ways – in its ability to speak to the moment – this version is the product of Old Bones’ situating of Gasner and Ézéquiel within the narrative and Laferrière acting as puppet-master outside it. Much as the novel began with a blurring of Old Bones and his father, so this performance of a new Antigone leads to a confusion among Ézéquiel, the recentlyrecruited stand-in actor, King Creon (whom he portrays) and Baby Doc (whom everyone sees in Creon). In order to highlight how amazing it is that Ézéquiel, all but improvising his portrayal of the king, has the audience eating out of his hand, Laferrière suggests that Sophocles could not have imagined his Creon winning over the audience. This may or may not be historically accurate, especially since the democratic audience of classical Athens may not have looked favorably on a royal princess demanding special burial rules for someone who attacked the city in hopes of winning the kingship, but this is hardly Laferrière’s concern. Rather, he highlights a conundrum of what it means for an artist to present a transcendent depiction of an abhorrent subject.21 In the hall that is already crackling with anticipation, Ézéquiel steps forward and delivers his first Sophoclean line: ‘Citizens, after the turmoil that shook us, the gods have put us back on our feet’ (Citoyens, après la tourmente qui nous a secoués, les dieux nous ont remis d’aplomb, 133 = Soph. Ant. 162–63: ἄνδρες, τὰ μὲν δὴ πόλεος ἀσφαλῶς θεοὶ/πολλῷ σάλῳ σείσαντες ὤρθωσαν πάλιν). The crowd goes wild. Ézéquiel, exuding braggadocio, winks at the audience. The screams become louder. Ézéquiel’s barely rehearsed portrayal of Creon, far from detracting from the show, is just what everyone wants. In this performance among friends, with everyone grieving for Gasner and raging against Baby Doc, the audience appreciates Ézéquiel’s wink as a sign that everyone understands what’s really going on, as if Ézéquiel, by perfectly embodying Creon, can thereby undermine Duvalier. But this also reveals a crux of Laferrière’s embedded Antigone: [Ézéquiel’s] kingly character fits him like a glove. He’s a boss, this guy. Since I know him well, I know he doesn’t have to play that role. Just let him be

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  189 himself. He does Ézéquiel. The room is conquered. But Creon is the rigidly entrenched king who faces the courageous daughter of Oedipus, Antigone. In short, the role of the villain. Anyone other than Ezéquiel would have had the hall against him.22 Ézéquiel is kingly and the role of Creon fits him, but surely this does not make him, in any meaningful way, similar to Creon or Duvalier. But it nonetheless raises the question of what the audience enjoys about a tyrannical figure in such circumstances. Is it possible to cheer for Ézéquiel without also cheering for Creon-Duvalier? Indeed, Old Bones mentions overhearing one comment after the show that raised precisely this point: ‘He still made us clap for a dictator. His performance was too good.’ (Il nous a quand même fait applaudir un dictateur. Son jeu était trop brilliant, 141). According to this logic that Laferrière (perhaps facetiously) sets out, the audience ought to be against Creon, just as they are against Baby Doc, and this means that an actor successfully playing this role ought to elicit boos rather than huzzahs. But something quite different takes place: Truly, there is something exceptional going on here. Even abnormal. I think that it’s our response to Gasner’s assassination. The regime expected to see us give up. They wanted to terrorize us, scare us, make us completely despair. Antigone responds for us. The play was not supposed to work this way, but the great classics always hit at the right time. We let off steam. We laugh. We applaud. We protest. Gasner is among us. He lives in each of us. I can hear his hoarse voice, feel his energy. Ezéquiel triumphs.23 The play was never supposed to be like this, whether we understand the agent hidden behind that statement to be Sophocles, Morisseau-Leroy or the director of this 1976 performance, but Gasner’s death has changed everything, much as Papa Doc’s ascendency made Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn subversive. And as Ézéquiel becomes a winking version of Creon-Duvalier, a version that has condemned Antigone-Gasner but who paradoxically sides with the audience in revealing and calling out the necropolitical excesses of Duvalierism, the boundary between actors and audience, between the living and the dead collapses. The final two sentences of the passage above even conflate all these characters as Old Bones, experiencing Ézéquiel’s triumphant performance, hears and feels the presence of his dead friend Gasner. As Ézéquiel rules the stage, Laferrière writes (and perhaps Old Bones shouts), ‘The king is dead! Long live the king!’ (Le roi est mort, vive le roi!, 134) The old slogan of royal continuity elides the death of the old king and the investiture of his successor with present tense verbs that cannot both be logically correct except in the mythology of kingship. The semantic possibilities explode, framed by the two facts that Gasner is dead, and King Creon lives on stage. The narrator immediately offers partial clarification that he is not referring to Creon at all but, rather, to Gasner and Ézéquiel. We might understand this to mean that Gasner is dead and Ézéquiel has taken his place, except that they are described not in succession but

190  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ as a pair, two ‘young princes of my generation’ (jeunes princes de ma generation, 134), as if they were Antigòn’s two dead brothers. Gasner has become a martyr, gaining new life as a ‘king’ because of his death. Ézéquiel embodies a king on stage, who is both Creon and Baby Doc and whom the audience would love to see dead. He plays his part so well that he becomes the ‘king’ of the stage and of the moment. But Creon remains alive even at the end of the play, and Baby Doc, a month shy of just his twenty-fifth birthday when the 23-year-old Gasner was murdered and the 23-year-old Laferrière fled the country, is an age-mate off this young crowd – not a senescent tyrant weighed down by age. In clarifying that the phrase ‘long live the king’ is not directed at Creon, the narrator notes that the Theban king ‘may well die’ (celui-là peut bien crever, 134). Here Laferrière may be looking toward the theatrical death of Creon/Kreyon/ Papa Doc uniquely portrayed by Morisseau-Leroy in his 1978 Wa Kreyon. This possibility seems more likely given the backstory that the actor slated to play Creon was in the hospital with angina pectoris, a condition that recalls the illness of Kreyon in Wa Kreyon and Papa Doc’s heart attack in 1959. Especially in light of this non-Sophoclean dramatization of Kreyon’s death and Emon’s succession as Chief-for-life of Tèb in Wa Kreyon, the slogan also recalls the transition from one Duvalier to another. In 1971 President-for-Life (François) Duvalier died and was succeeded by President-for-Life (Jean-Claude) Duvalier. With this last connection, time frames further multiply and conflate. Le cri . . . , published in 2000, describes a 1976 performance, which blends Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn of 1953 and Sophocles’ ancient Antigone (5th c. BCE) and which looks toward both Morisseau-Leroy’s Wa Kreyon of 1978 and the transition from Papa Doc to Baby Doc in 1971. As these associations swirl around Antigone, the ‘universal’ myth of resisting authoritarianism, and Gasner, the local champion who died resisting Duvalierism, the narrator returns to the scenario in which the audience delights in a theatrical depiction of a leader they hate: ‘It is a strange audience that simultaneously applauds the executioner and the victim’ (C’est un public étrange qui applaudit en même temps le bourreau et la victim, 135).24 This observation prompts the longest quotation of Sophocles’ play within the novel, an eighteen-line exchange between Antigone and Creon, which culminates with the lines used as the second epigraph of the novel (Soph. Ant. 508–25). As Antigone holds her ground against Creon, the crowd cheers again, in support of Antigone’s just cause and Ézéquiel’s rapturous portrayal of the dastardly Creon. Old Bones notes that ‘everyone knows this story’ (on connaît l’histoire, 136), which might simply be another reference to the prominence Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn or the familiarity of the Greek myth, but instead it elicits a historical reflection on what his generation has lived through. He links the scene on stage to the ‘Young Haiti’ (Jeune Haiti) insurrection of 1964 which failed to dislodge Papa Doc (and which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter). In that encounter, the last two rebels to be found were publicly executed and their bodies were left on display and unburied.25 Laferrière says that ‘To write this story, Sophocles must have witnessed such scenes. Nothing has changed since’ (Pour écrire son histoire, Sophocle a dû assister à de pareilles scènes. Rien n’a changé depuis, 136). The

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  191 Creon who had driven the elder Laferrière into exile in 1959 and displayed unburied corpses in 1964 is the same as the new Creon oppressing new Antigones (including the dead Gasner and the younger Laferrière) in 1976. At this point, it would be easy to imagine Le cris . . . culminating with an image of the revolutionary power of Antigone, but Laferrière and Old Bones turn in other directions. This is fitting, since any such triumphalism would clash with the reality that Baby Doc would remain in power for another decade after this Antigone of 1976. First, Old Bones shifts his focus away from the arts and towards romance. He devotes much of the novel to tracking down his beloved Lisa, rebalancing the political themes with his desire to see her one last time before leaving Haiti. While thinking about Lisa and all that is going on, he wonders if he should stay – both to be with her (and his mother and grandmother) and to participate in the resistance. But what exactly is the resistance? Ézéquiel seems to be doing something powerful on stage, but Old Bones notes that off-stage his political interests lie elsewhere, namely in Africa. Ézéquiel praises Sékou Touré’s stance against France and du Gaule – another version of Antigone’s powerful No! – but when Old Bones compares the Guinean president’s human rights abuses to those of Papa Doc, Ézéquiel shrugs it off. How can Ézéquiel take a stand against the brutality of Duvalierism when he supports a similar brand of necropolitics elsewhere? Amid such thoughts about Lisa and his departure, Old Bones is jostled back to the present by more cheers from the crowd as Ézéquiel again takes center stage. This time, Creon faces off against his son Hemon, and Old Bones makes the connection explicit: ‘We can only dream of Baby Doc taking such a stand before Papa Doc’ (On rêverait de voir Baby Doc se dresser ainsi devant Papa Doc, 138). There follows another eleven lines from Sophocles’ play (728–39), in which Hemon condemns Creon’s stance by saying, among other things, that the people of Thebes are against his father. Whereas Hemon says that Creon would make a fine ruler over a desert, Laferrière follows up the Sophoclean passage with the comment that ‘Papa Doc – he ruled over a cemetery’ (Papa Doc, lui, a régné sur un cimetière, 139), referencing Duvalier’s well-known identification with Baron Samedi, the Vodou lwa who rules over cemeteries and the dead. The show concludes. Adoring fans lift Ézéquiel onto their shoulders. Old Bones spots Lisa in the crowd and elbows his way toward her, but someone grabs him by the back of the neck. It is Ézéquiel, who has made a beeline for his friend. The two embrace, and their quick exchange gets to the crux of Laferrière’s use of Antigone in Le cri . . . The young men share their grief over Gasner, and Old Bones rejoices that the old rivalry between their dead friend and Ézéquiel has been put to rest. ‘The miracle has finally happened. Beyond death. My dearest hope has been realized: Gasner and Ézéquiel finally recognize each other as brothers.’26 But these brothers beyond death are not quite Antigone’s brothers. Those two were biological brothers but also enemies to the bitter end, whereas Gasner and Ézéquiel have become brothers only after the former’s death and the latter’s transcendent experience on stage. Laferrière alternates between underlining the transhistorical similarities of this story (‘Sophocles must have witnessed such scenes’, ‘everyone knows the story’) and spotlighting the differences (‘for us, Morisseau-Leroy is the point of

192  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ reference’, Gasner and Ézéquiel end in a very different situation from that of Eteocles and Polynices). Ézéquiel, still clinging to Old Bones, makes the strongest possible case for theater as direct political action: ‘Ah! Old Bones, we’re not going to give in. They won’t get us. We are not going to disappoint Gasner. What we have to do is change our tactics. We will force them to confront us on our ground. And our ground is Culture.’27 As Ézéquiel lays out this battle strategy, however, Old Bones already knows that he is about to become a deserter: ‘There’s nothing more political, here, than culture, I say, but without any conviction.’ (Il n’y a rien de plus politique, ici, que la culture, dis-je, presque sans conviction, 140). Ézéquiel, so sensitive to the nuances of embodying the tyrant on stage, misses his friend’s disingenuous tone and begins dancing around with excitement. That’s it! He says happily. Everyone will do what they can. You in the newspaper. Me, in the theater and on the radio. Everyone will work tirelessly to improve in their own niche. That’s how we will change this country, even under the dictator’s beard. We all know that he does everything in his power to make us mediocre, because it’s always easier to lead incompetent people. Good! Get it all on the radio as soon as you can. I’ll be there by midnight. OK?28 After another tepid assent, Old Bones wonders ‘How can you look a brother in the face whom you are about to betray?’29 Old Bones knows that he is about to stab Ézéquiel in the back and walk away from the in-country resistance to Duvalierism. These two young men replay the fratricidal betrayal of the brothers of Antigone, though in this case the betrayal is one-sided rather than mutual. Yet later in the novel Laferrière reminds his readers that the greatest crux of the novel is not Old Bones’ decision to stay or go but, rather, the issue of the assassinated man’s corpse: ‘Gasner’s sister, like the Antigone of Sophocles and Morisseau-Leroy, bemoans the death of her brother and takes a stand against Duvalier-Creon, who refuses to allow him the burial rites of his family’s traditions’.30 This final reference to Antigone in Le cri . . . brings the two playwrights together just as Laferrière introduces the hyphenated character of Duvalier-Creon. Fifth-century BCE Greece, Haiti of the 1950’s (before MorisseauLeroy and the elder Laferrière had fled) and Haiti of 1976 unite in overlapping opposition to a universal brand of political oppression. In these lines the myth of Antigone aligns historical eras and harmonizes modes of resistance against patterns of political violence. Yet the myth does not fit the situation perfectly. Gasner’s sister has the moral authority of Antigone but no chance to confront Duvalier-Creon directly. Ézéquiel paradoxically radiates Antigone-like energy for the resistance through his portrayal of Creon. Old Bones knows that he is about to betray his brother, not by killing him but by choosing the safety of exile. And although Baby Doc is like Creon in living on after an encounter with the voice of Antigone, the two rulers share little else, since neither the novel nor historical sources give any indication that the regime is bothered by or even aware

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  193 of the opposition to the assassination of Gasner. The revolutionary ardor shared by everyone at the performance of Antigone seems to have evaporated, and as Laferrière composed Le cri . . . he knew that Baby Doc’s downfall in 1986 would have nothing directly to do with Gasner’s assassination. The novel toys with but ultimately stops well short of the idea that a performance of Antigone might bring down a tyrant. Such a romantic fiction would have been not only facile and trite but also glaringly a-historical, and the political power of Le cri . . . emerges rather through the hope and creativity that Bessette notes as a unifying aspect of Laferrière’s novels that are set in Haiti (Bessette 2013, 16). Furthermore, as Ng’ang’a wa Muchiri discusses in reference to another of Laferrière’s novels, ‘ “popular” modes of cultural performance and representation function as a means of coping with, and even challenging, political violence’ (2013, 22).31 A performance of Antigone may not bring down a dictator, but that does not mean that it has no political importance. Perhaps it is for this reason that the second half of the novel shifts away from Antigone (and the focus that her myth necessitates on the centrality of the dictator) and toward other mythical figures more relevant to Old Bones’ departure. Laferrière offers an homage to Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn not through a simplistic idea that a performance of that mythical tale can immediately upend oppressive politics, but, rather, by showing new ways to harmonize Greek and Haitian culture in a deep critique of the politics of oppression and the traumas such politics engender. Old Bones, Legba and Ulysses in Le cri des oiseaux fous In the latter part of Le cri . . . Laferrière brings together two characters who offer a contrast to Antigone’s resolute refusal to move (physically or ethically) away from her family: Ulysses, the Roman name for Odysseus, the wandering hero of Homer’s Odyssey, and Legba, the Vodou lwa in charge of the boundary between the human and spiritual worlds. Unlike Antigone, Ulysses and Legba are fluid, dynamic intermediaries and apt characters to invoke upon leaving home. And like Laferrière himself, both are tricksters. Ulysses was the mastermind of the Greek (more properly: Achaean or Danaan, since Homer does not project a unified concept of Greece) victory in the Trojan War through his ruse of the Trojan Horse. As such, he could perhaps be imagined as the hero to bring down Duvalierism, but that is not his role in Le cri . . . For Laferrière/Old Bones the most pressing personal issue was not a romanticized heroism that remakes the world but, rather, getting out of Haiti and attending to his relationships as best he could. Accordingly, Laferrière has Ulysses play the part of the hero who finds his way home, a theme that dances teasingly around Old Bones’ imminent departure. In Ulysses’ mythology, the matter of returning home is fraught with adventurous challenges and disorienting situations, but it is conceptually simple. Ulysses is defined by his home on Ithaca where he is husband to Penelope, father to Telemachus and son to Laertes.32 ‘Ulysses,’ the narrator whispers when Old Bones is admiring the women in a brothel, ‘remember your wife’ (Ulysse, ta femme t’attend!, 83).

194  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ For Laferrière and a generation of Haitians, however, the concept of home had been fundamentally disrupted by Duvalierism. The Haitian diaspora traced countless departures from the violence riddling their homeland toward the uncertainty of new homes, and Laferrière grinds this reality against the Greek mythical logic of Ulysses, for whom nothing new can ever truly be home. As the tyrant denied Haitians the freedom to live in their own country, waves of exiles followed MorisseauLeroy and the elder Laferrière away from Haiti in hopes of successfully navigating the experiences of diaspora. Ulysses enjoys a stable and singular concept of home, but diasporic existences must juggle multiplicities – a home that has been left behind, a home to be created, and all the interstices of statelessness, homelessness, and paperlessness that can impede the process of emigration and immigration.33 This border zone between conceptualizations of home that may overlap or contradict one another occurs in a liminal nether space that parallels Legba’s sphere of influence. For this reason, the last quarter of Le cri recasts Old Bones as a new Ulysses, whose journey out of Haiti is overseen by a character named Legba and helped by a pair of women who blend Homeric narratives and Vodou powers. Having left the theatre where Antigone had just concluded, Old Bones meets this Legba in a chapter titled Les chiens d’enfer (12 h 28) (‘The Hell-Hounds, 12:28 am’).34 He is wandering through Port-au-Prince trying to find Lisa (who had left the theatre while he was talking with Ézéquiel), when he encounters a pack of aggressive dogs, the animals most sacred to Legba. The standoff is narrated in minute detail. The pack surround him and close in, and Old Bones realizes that these dogs think like humans. They play their part with the ‘tactical acumen of General Louverture’ (précision du general Louverture, 207), and in response, he must do something unexpected. He decides he must ‘become a dog’ (devenir un chien, 209) in hopes of throwing them off. As the dogs behave like the troops of the Revolutionary general, and the human becomes canine in a desperate bid to survive, a car suddenly pulls up, the door opens, and Old Bones jumps in. The driver introduces himself: ‘My name is Legba – like the Vodou god, but no relation’ (Je m’appelle Legba, comme le dieu vaudou, mais aucune parenté, 215). In a novel in which the autofictional narrator looks like the author and his father, the revolutionary Ézéquiel thrives as King Creon, and the two Duvaliers are interchangeable tyrants, no reader will take Legba’s words at face value.35 Legba agrees to take Old Bones wherever he may be going. As they navigate a city organized by revolutionary heroes (Pétionville, la place Boyer, la rue Capoix), the two discover that they are going to the same place. Old Bones thinks that Lisa is at the home of his friend Bibi, who is celebrating her birthday, and Legba laughs at the coincidence, since he is Bibi’s uncle (her father, a doctor, being his brother). He was heading to Bibi’s party anyway and is happy to have Old Bones join him for the drive. In a line seemingly designed exclusively for non-Haitian readers, he adds: ‘I’m not called Lebga for nothing. It’s after the god of the Vodou pantheon who guards the door to the invisible world. Legba helps you get from one world to another.’36 Indeed, just as the trickster god Hermes had helped Odysseus/Ulysses avoid being turned into a pig on the island of Circe in Homer’s Odyssey this Legba saves Old Bones from becoming a dog (or dog food) and brings him safely to a new place.

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  195 Inside Bibi’s house, Old Bones is confronted with the figure of Sandra, who lures him with epic temptation: ‘Ulysses had to stop up his ears to avoid hearing the Sirens’ song. To escape Sandra, you’d have to blind yourself.’37 Pulling himself away, Old Bones searches everywhere for Lisa but instead finds himself again speaking with Legba. The older man had wanted to introduce Old Bones to his brother (Bibi’s father), but he says that the doctor, on call even on his daughter’s birthday, had to leave to see a patient. As Legba departs, Old Bones says that he hopes they will meet again, and his new friend replies in a way that further suggests he is more than human: ‘He gave me a knowing smile. “We’ll meet again.” And he disappeared into the night.’38 Legba’s friendly but uncanny behavior becomes even more mysterious moments later when Old Bones mentions to Bibi that he had met her uncle. She looks perplexed and tells Old Bones that her father has been dead for ten years, that he never had a brother and that he had not been a doctor. This news leaves Old Bones with only two choices: either Bibi is lying, because she is embarrassed about her uncle (Legba seemed ‘rather rustic’ (un peu paysan, 236) compared to Bibi), or else something more mystical is happening. Ulysses never seemed surprised when the gods manifested their power before him, but Old Bones wonders ‘who am I that the powerful Legba himself has come to oversee my departure?’39 These options make sense to Old Bones, but neither gods nor novelists operate in the realm of discrete binary options: ‘for the gods, truth, like lying, is a human concern – they don’t have to take it into account.’40 Having finally tracked down Lisa for a last goodbye, Old Bones is on the verge of boarding the plane to leave Haiti. He is joined by two female friends from the brothel where, pages earlier, the narrator had reminded Ulysses to remember his wife. He gets ready to go, while Mercedes and Fifine plead with him to stay. They think he is too skinny and flirtatiously coax him to delay his trip so that they can fatten him up. Like the Greek hero leaving Circe or Calypso, Old Bones pulls himself away from this erotic offer to make a new home and declares, ‘Ulysses must go,’ (Ulysse doit partir, 307).41 Fifine asks who this Ulysses character is, and Mercedes thinks that Old Bones is delirious. He explains that he was referring to the hero of the Trojan War who ‘absolutely had to get back home’ (il lui faut absolument rentrer chez lui, 307) to be with his wife. Again, the women are perplexed. Mercedes laughs that this is what every customer tells her in the morning, and Fifine points out that Old Bones is not even married. No one mentions the obvious point that Old Bones is already home, and he slips away from their comments by saying that he is merely hungry. Old Bones may not be an obvious Ulysses (on the verge of leaving home rather than returning and with no wife waiting for him), but the women understand hunger. They forget about the mythical hero and make a meal, Old Bones’ last in Haiti, for their friend.42 Whereas earlier in the novel Laferrière had distinguished the Greek and Haitian versions of Antigone’s myth, here he brings about a harmonization of Greek and Haitian culture in the vein of Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn. Fifine may not know (or care) who Ulysses is, but Old Bones sees with double vision. ‘ “It’s the belly that speaks,’ Homer says. Fifine and Homer would have understood each other’

196  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ (‘C’est le ventre qui parle’, dit Homère. Fifine et Homère se seraient bien entendus,’ 307).43 As Fifine and Mercedes prepare the meal, Old Bones pretends to catch a few moments of sleep and sees something miraculous. Thinking that their friend is not watching, Fifine distorts her face, utters a scream so high pitched that human ears cannot hear it, and causes a fish to leap from the sea into her hands. As she transfers the fish to the pan, Old Bones realizes that he is being fed by the daughters of Agoué, the Vodou lwa of the sea.44 Legba’s friendship and involvement seems to have opened new possibilities for Old Bones as his final moments in Haiti bring him into auspicious contact with Agoué (in sharp contrast to Ulysses’ enmity with the Greek/Roman sea god, Poseidon/Neptune). Having received this blessing and meal, Old Bones thanks the two women (Fifine and Mercedes, but also daughters of Agoué) and ‘like Ulysses’ (comme Ulysse, 308) he finally walks away. The last chapter of Le cri . . . is titled ‘A God Opens a gateway for me (6:58 am)’ (Un dieu m’ouvre la barrière (6 h 58)). As Old Bones boards the plane he spots Legba, who smiles and wishes him a safe journey. The young man remembers his grandmother, Da, telling him that one can never cross into a different world without Legba’s help in opening a gateway. He takes comfort in recognizing the god’s tutelary presence and knows that he has been protected, ever since his encounter with the dogs. Unlike the rest of Haiti, he has been beyond the reach of Duvalier for these last hours, and his departure has been assured. But he also notes that the Vodou lwa will not join him on the journey and that he will soon face a whole new world, with new norms, rhythms and habits. Old Bones and Laferrière briefly stand apart from one another, as the older author has the young man say that he must forget the lwa and everything about his life in Haiti in order to survive what is ahead and to avoid sinking into nostalgia (nostalgie, 318), the same nostalgia that saturates Laferrière’s entire corpus. Nostos, the ancient Greek word meaning ‘homecoming’ and the root of nostalgia/nostalgie, is the dominant theme in Homer’s Odyssey, but Laferrière has turned that epic inside out and crafted a Ulysses who does not fight his way home. Instead, he brings himself to the point of being ready to depart. Earlier in Le cri . . . the narrator had urged Old Bones: Ulysse, ta femme t’attend! (‘Ulysses, remember your wife!, 83). The last line of the novel before a brief epilogue puts the realities of exile in stark relief: ‘Montreal is not waiting for me,’ (Montréal ne m’attend pas, 318).45 Conclusion: Penelope is Not in Montreal The brief coda underscores that Le cri . . . has been an exploration of the possibilities of spanning the gulfs in Laferrière’s/Old Bones’ life – the time between 1976 and 2000, the distance between Port-au-Prince and Montreal, but more powerfully the distance between people (especially father and son), between competing visions of home, and between versions of oneself. The closing scene is set ten years later in Montreal. The phone rings, and Old Bones is told that his father is about to die in New York. Although both men fled Haiti to North America, they had not been in contact, and Old Bones relates that the one time he had tried to visit his father in New York, the elder Laferrière refused to

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  197 open the door and claimed that he did not have a son, ‘since Duvalier had turned all of Haiti into zombies’ (puisque Duvalier a fait de tous les Haïtiens des zombies, 319). Does this comment mean that the elder Laferrière denies ever having had a son or that any child would have succumbed to the zombification of Duvalier and therefore would no longer count as a child? Whatever the case, Old Bones’ father was no longer willing or able to have a relationship with his son. Despite the coincidence of their shared name, appearance and exilic narratives, despite the possibility of renewing a physical and emotional closeness, they could not bridge the divide. Confronted with the news of his father’s death, Old Bones calls his mother. Instead of showing any reaction to the passing of her husband, she notes how quickly her son’s accent, which Laferrière terms l’accent de l’exil, ‘the accent of exile’ (319), has changed. The death of Laferrière’s father may have unfolded in just this way, but his autofictional style should give us pause. His father died in New York in 1984, and so the timing, at least, of the coda to Le cri . . . , ten years after Old Bones’ departure in 1976, does not quite fit. But the scene does forge two important connections. Historically, the major Haitian event of 1986 was the ouster of Baby Doc Duvalier, who left the country and spent the rest of his life in France. After a novel obsessively focused on the social chaos wrought by Duvalierism, the epilogue may point to this important transition to a new era. This connection suggests a twisted entangling of patriarchal impressions as the biological father, whom Old Bones hardly knew, blends into the dictator, Old Bones’ age-mate and known commonly as ‘Baby’, who sustained his own father’s brutality throughout his fifteen-year reign. In terms of Laferrière’s oeuvre, however, this way of concluding Le cri .  .  . links directly with the opening scene of L’énigme du retour (2009). That novel opens with Old Bones receiving the call about his father’s death, and it follows Old Bones on his journey back to Haiti to bury his father in his hometown. This later novel in many ways reverses the themes of Le cri . . . by focusing on the experience of leaving Canada to return to Haiti after so long. One of the major literary engagements of L’énigme du retour is with Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook on a return to the motherland, 1939), itself an anti-colonial repurposing of Homer’s Odyssey.46 In this sense the retour of Laferrière’s title, the ‘return’ or the Greek nostos, is simultaneously the personal journey of Old Bones/ Laferrière and that of his deceased father back to Haiti, while also being a replay of the Homeric journey from Troy to Ithaca and Césaire’s deeply reflective return from France to Martinique. Homer’s Odyssey has become the canonical, perhaps even unavoidable, template for epic travel narratives, and, as noted above, its presentation of the idea of a homeland is straightforward. Ulysses’ Ithaca seems to have been frozen in time during the hero’s twenty-year absence. The city has not held a single deliberative meeting, Penelope has managed to forestall the many suitors’ hopes of marrying her, and neither Penelope nor Ulysses seems to have aged. Among the few signs that time has passed are the maturation of Ulysses’ son Telemachus, who has grown to the cusp of manhood, the death of Ulysses’ mother, and the aging of the hero’s favorite dog, a mature hunter when he left for the Trojan War twenty years

198  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ prior. The Homeric epic thus presents an exaggeratedly fixed notion of home that is barely touched by the procession of time. In Le cri .  .  . and L’énigme du retour Laferrière absorbs and repurposes the canonical figure of Ulysses to different ends. In Le cri . . . Ulysses presents an alternative to Antigone by contrasting heroic models of surviving by journeying on or dying for the right to remain in place (both physically and ethically). Ulysses’ return feels like a thin hope that Old Bones, departing Haiti at the end of the novel, will eventually find his way back home to Haiti someday. In L’énigme du retour Ulysses, who is never named, is sensed through the title’s emphasis on a nostos, through Césaire’s role in Old Bones’ reading, through a reference to Aeneas (a Roman twist on the Greek hero of the nostos), and through the journey itself. But one enigma of the novel is that Old Bones falls between two conceptualizations of home.47 Whereas Ulysses came back to a home that was intimately familiar, Old Bones returns to Haiti and feels that he has largely become an outsider, ‘a foreigner even in the city of [his] birth’ (119). At one point he imagines starting the rumor that he has decided to live there without specifying what place he means, and he predicts that ‘in Montreal people will believe I’m in Port-au-Prince and in Portau-Prince they’ll be sure I’m still in Montreal’ (97). The default assumption in both communities is that the diasporic Old Bones must be more at home there than here. But if everyone assumes that he is more at home there, then he can never convince those around him that he feels a deep sense of belonging here. In both novels, Laferrière follows Morisseau-Leroy in blending Greek and Haitian themes and images. Morisseau-Leroy had been overt and intentional about his goal of hacking the myth of Antigone as a way to demonstrate the bona fides of Creole and to put Haitian culture into dialogue with global artistic trends. For Laferrière, by contrast, all such literary posturing is presented through the thoughts, chance encounters and reading habits of Old Bones. In Le cri . . . Antigone seems to be a figure with the power to bring down a dictator, but the moment passes as the catharsis experienced in the theater meets the intractable brutality of Duvalierism in the streets. But Laferrière’s focus on Antigone and on Morisseau-Leroy’s Haitianizing of her myth may have less to do with the hope that a performance might instantly remake the world and more to do with the power of blending Greek and Vodou material into a call for resisting oppression that is harnessed to and energized by Haiti’s stature as the first anti-colonial nation. As Old Bones becomes a new Ulysses, he encounters Legba, who allows a final meal with the daughters of Agoué just before Old Bones steps onto the plane that will take him north. And in L’énigme du retour, an older Old Bones arrives to his father’s hometown and is received as a manifestation of Legba (a different way of marking the diasporic person as something other than familiarly local). As Old Bones moves across landscapes and borders, wandering through Laferrère’s nostalgia-driven autofiction, Legba serves to ensure that barriers are removed and gateways are opened for this traveler. Laferrière and Old Bones, experts at the gentle drift (la dérive douce), difficult to distinguish and so easy to conflate, make sense of their worlds in part through this Haitian blending of Greek and Vodou. Sophocles and Homer, through Caribbean intermediaries like Morisseau-Leroy and Césaire, return to help us understand

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  199 the world in changed circumstances. Building upon their achievements, Laferrière sharpens his habit of hacking the literary canon (where Basho, Césaire and Morisseau-Leroy now reside for Old Bones) through his expectation that readers will scrutinize his literary filiations as both a way to honor the ancestors and to differentiate himself from them. In an interview in which he contrasted his literary style with that of Frankétienne (a rare example of a Haitian intellectual who survived Duvalierism without leaving Haiti), Laferrière described his work in just such terms: ‘. . . I always thought of myself as classical (but not at all in the manner of the pompous 19th-century French sentence that seems to have been permanently adopted by Haitian writers): I wanted to be subversive in tone and classical in form’ (Coates 1999, 914). Stylistically, Laferrière seems classical primarily in terms of the quick and easy flow of his prose, which often feels Homeric in its pace. His subversiveness, however, emerges through his refusal to center melodramatic narratives about the political instability of Haiti. His life and corpus have, in many real and powerful ways, been shaped by the corrosiveness of Duvalierism and Haiti’s turbulent history since then (which has been worsened by the impacts of climate change and problems associated with international interventions), but his novels leave such themes to the background and focus, instead, on Old Bones’ efforts to find joy, humor and companionship. In a more recent interview, Laferrière put it this way: ‘When you talk politics, the dictator’s central: you’re for him or against him. But I fought against the dictatorship by trying to prevent it from being the centre of my life. The most subversive thing is to be happy in spite of the dictator.’ (Jaggi 2013). In Le cri des oiseaux fous and L’énigme du retour Laferrière offers distinctively 21st-century, post-Duvalier, cosmopolitan subversions of classical narratives in which Old Bones seeks out such happiness within a literary space where new versions of Antigone and Ulysses comfortably coexist with the likes of Legba and the daughters of Agoué. Notes 1 Laferrière 2000. No English translation has been published, and all translations are my own. Citations follow the pagination of the 2010 edition (Les Éditions du Boréal). 2 Cacchioli 2015, 5 reads Le cri .  .  . as giving pride of place to Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn and relegating the Sophoclean play to une référence oubliée. As I will show in the coming pages, however, such an interpretation misses the ligatures that Laferrière foregrounds between his own novel and the plays of both Sophocles and Morisseau-Leroy. 3 This theme has been studied most broadly by Haitian scholar Max Dorsinville (1988), whose uncle Roger Dorsinville was a prolific author who, like Morisseau-Leroy, left Duvalier’s Haiti and spent much of his adult life in Senegal. Important updates to this theme can be found in McConnell 2013; Andújar 2022. 4 ‘Ce n’est que pure coincidence,’ (1985, 110 = 1987, 145–46). 5 Laferrière’s quotations of Sophocles follow the translation of Robert Pignarre (1964): Antigone: Je suis faite pour partager l’amour, non la haine. / Créon: Descends donc là-bas et, s’il te faut aimer à tout prix, aime les morts. Sophocles’ Greek (523–25): οὔτοι συνέχθειν, ἀλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυν. / κάτω νυν ἐλθοῦσ᾽, εἰ φιλητέον, φίλει / κείνους . . .

200  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’ 6 Throughout Le cri . . . Laferrière uses his friend’s first name, Gasner, and I follow his habit for clarity while realizing that the author’s use of his friend’s first name reflects and fosters their personal intimacy and that I experience that intimacy only vicariously as a reader of Laferrière’s text. 7 Mukenge and Kayumba 2018, 135 make a similar point by drawing on the idea of rhizomatic intertextuality, a concept brought to prominence by Deleuze and Guattari 1980 and importantly refined by Glissant 1996. 8 A series of brief notices in the New York Times charts the elder Laferrière’s career in this period. In the 1957 transitional government that preceded Duvalier’s election, he served in President Frank Sylvain’s cabinet (‘An Interim Cabinet is Named in Haiti’, Feb. 10, 1957). Later that year he was found in possession of a weapons cache destined for supporters of Duvalier (‘Haiti’s President Forced to Resign’, April 3, 1957). And in 1958 the paper described him as a ‘firebrand’ in an announcement that he had been sacked as Mayor of Port-au-Prince by Duvalier (‘Haiti’s President Dismisses Mayor’, May 8, 1958). A month later, Le Nouveliste announced that Laferrière had left Haiti to serve as ambassador to Argentina (‘Départ de W. Laferrière’, June 7, 1958). 9 L’affaire est que je ressemble beaucoup à mon père, et parfois, j’ai l’impression que ma mère éprouve certaines difficultés à faire la différence entre lui et moi (12). 10 This confusion of names continues in l’Énigme du retour, which is dedicated to Laferrière’s nephew who also goes by Dany and is an aspiring writer. 11 The novel’s chapters are all keyed to the 24-hour period covered by the narrative and have similar time-stamps. 12 This detail hits home. I was directing a reading of Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn in Dakar in 2018 and the actor slated to play Kreyon backed out at the last minute. My friend and host, Cheikh Thiam, quickly called in a favor with a former student who was then working as an actor. He stepped in and, after one read-through, did an amazing job as Kreyon. 13 The title of Morisseau-Leroy’s play has appeared variously as Antigòn an Kreyòl in the 1953 edition, Antigone en Creole in the 1970, and Antigòn in 1997. 14 Pour nous, la référence, ce n’est pas Sophocle, mais plutôt Morisseau-Leroy qui a placé la pièce du dramaturge grec dans la paysannerie haïtienne, ce qui lui donne tout son sens pour nous. Vaudou et paysannerie sont au goût du jour, 38. Such commentary shows a clear legacy of Price-Mars’ career, as discussed in Chapter 5. 15 Although the novel does not raise this issue overtly, the narrator’s quip also calls Basho’s identity into question. By reading Basho, has the narrator made the master of the haiku into a Canadian writer? a French writer? a black writer? 16 Danticat 2010, 16, in a discussion of Laferrière’s book and analyzed in more detail in Chapter 9. Greenwood 2013 has used both Laferrière’s claim and Danticat’s comments upon it in developing her idea of an ‘omni-local classical receptions’. Burns, 2019, 31–45 discusses Laferrière’s novel (and career) in terms of its ‘rejection of an essentialist national identity in favour of a literary identification that transcends the nation-state’ (40). 17 Toute tragédie n’est-elle pas forcément personnelle, même quand elle devient un drame collectif? Antigone, c’est d’abord le drame personnel d’une jeune femme du nom d’Antigone. Quand un tonton macoute vous pourchasse avec un .38 à cause de vos opinions, est-ce une tragédie personnelle ou une tragédie nationale? Qui est le plus en danger, dans une telle situation, vous ou votre pays? C’est le genre de devinettes qu’on ne vous pose que dans les pays pauvres. Le Sphinx, dans ce cas-là, c’est le dictateur. (108) 18 Because we do not know the date of Sophocles’ Antigone it is difficult to pin the play to historical specifics, but Oedipus Rex, Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Euripides’ Trojan Women, to take three prominent examples, are regularly read as responses to recent events: respectively, the Athenian plague that began in 430 BCE, the progressive reforms of the Athenian government in the late 460’s that are associated with the figure of Ephialtes, and the siege of Melos in 416, when Athens carried out a genocidal purge of the island because of its political neutrality in the Peloponnesian War.

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  201 19 As discussed in Chapter 9. 20 The 2015 edition of Le cri . . . (Zulma, Paris) includes a note on the title page that passages of Antigone follow the translation of Robert Pignarre, though other editions have not included this comment. 21 This question has been taken up from various academic perspectives. Updated discussions are offered by Carroll 2021 and Matthes 2021. 22 Son personnage de roi lui va comme un gant. C’est un chef, ce type. Comme je le connais bien, je sais qu’il n’a pas à jouer ce rôle. Qu’il se contente d’être lui-même. Il fait du Ézéquiel. La salle est conquise. Pourtant, Créon est le roi un peu borné qui fait face à la courageuse fille d’Oedipe, Antigone. Le rôle du vilain, en somme. Tout autre qu’Ézéquiel aurait eu la salle contre lui, 133 23 Vraiment, il se passe quelque chose d’exceptionnel ici. D’anormal même. Je crois que c’est notre réponse à l’assassinat de Gasner. Le pouvoir s’attendait à nous voir baisser les bras. On voulait nous terroriser, nous faire peur, nous désespérer totalement. Antigone répond à notre place. La pièce n’était pas prévue à cette fin, mais c’est le propre des grands classiques de tomber toujours au bon moment. On se défoule. On rit. On applaudit. On proteste. Gasner est parmi nous. Il habite en chacun de nous. Je peux entendre sa voix rauque, sentir son énergie. Ézéquiel triomphe, 134. 24 I have translated Laferrière’s un public as ‘an audience’, but its valence as ‘the public’ or ‘a populace’ also suggests the state-enforced theatrics of compelling bystanders to cheer for the Duvaliers whenever they were in public. Laferrière has described such a scene as he experienced it in Port-au-Prince as a teenager: ‘[Papa Doc Duvalier] would go by in his car, distributing money to people. He would throw out coins and you had to yell “Long live Duvalier” as he passed’ (Coates 1999, 919). 25 These are Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, though not named in the novel, who had both fled Haiti in the late 1950’s, just as the elder Laferrière and Morisseau-Leroy had done, before returning to lead this failed insurrection. 26 Le miracle est enfin arrivé. Par-delà la mort. Mon voeu le plus cher s’est réalisé: Gasner et Ézéquiel se reconnaissent enfin comme frères, 140. 27 Ah! Vieux Os, on ne va pas se laisser abattre. Ils ne nous auront pas. Nous n’allons pas décevoir Gasner. Ce qu’il faut faire, c’est changer de tactique. Nous les obligerons à venir nous chercher sur notre terrain. Et notre terrain, c’est la culture, 140. 28 C’est exactement ça! lance-t-il joyeusement. Chaque personne va faire ce qu’elle sait faire. Toi, au journal. Moi, au théâtre et à la radio. Chacun travillera sans relâche à s’améliorer dans son domaine. C’est ainsi que nous changerons ce pays, à la barbe même du dictateur. Il fait, on le sait, tout ce qui es en son pouvoir pour nous rendre médiocres parce qu’il est toujours plus facile de diriger des incompétents. Bon, passe tout à l’heure à la radio. Je serai là jusqu’à minuit. D’accord?, 140. 29 Comment regarder en face un frère qu’on s’apprête à trahir?, 141. 30 La soeur de Gasner, comme l’Antigone de Sophocle et de Morisseau-Leroy, pleure la mort de son frère et se révolte contre Duvalier-Créon qui s’oppose à ce qu’on l’enterre selon les rites funéraires de la foi de sa famille, 261. 31 In reference to Laferrière 1992. In a similar vein, Braziel 2004, 95 who reads Le cri . . . through its engagement with Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Amour, colère, folie (1968), sees in Laferrière’s novel a ‘persistency of madness in the face of violence [that] indicts the present as it does the past’. 32 In a recent interview with Megan J. Myers, Edwidge Danticat discussed her own experiences and showed how uncertain the idea of home can be for immigrants: ‘you realize that you have little control over what home is’ (466). 33 Classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta aptly drew on the story of Ulysses in titling his autobiography Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin, 2016). 34 This phrase is an example of what Figueroa (2012, 151) points to in terms of the interpretive openness of such section headings in Le cri . . . Old Bones does encounter dogs

202  ‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’

35

36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45

in this section, but they also open the narrative to the mystical realm through the figure of Legba, as discussed below. Furthermore, the heading nods toward the mother of Old Bones’ girlfriend Lisa, whom he frequently refers to by the nickname Cerberus, the three-headed hell-hound of Greek mythology. In confronting these ‘infernal hounds’, Old Bones becomes a kind of Hercules, who, like Legba, elides life and death by defeating Cerberus. Figueroa 2012, 153–154 compares this scene to Laferrière’s description of the performance of Antigone inasmuch as both represent creative acts of resistance. Confronted with the ‘hounds of hell’, Old Bones survives through the improvisation of transforming himself into a dog. Ce n’est pas pour rien qu’on m’appelle Legba. Il fait référence au dieu du panthéon vaudou qui se tient à la porte du monde invisible. Legba vous facilite le passage d’un monde à un autre, 218. Ulysse a dû se boucher les oreilles pour ne pas entendre le chant des sirènes. Pour échapper à Sandra, il faudrait se crever les yeux, 220. Il me fait un sourire complice. – On se reverra. Il disparaît dans la nuit, 221. qui suis-je pour que le puissant Legba en personne se déplace pour me faciliter le passage?, 236. pour les dieux, vérité comme mensonge étant affaires humaines, ils n’ont pas à en tenir compte, 237. I am grateful to Justine McConnell for the suggestion that Old Bones’ words here may also evoke Aeneas’ parting comment to Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid: Italiam non sponte sequor, ‘I do not set out for Italy willingly’ (4.361). Old Bones is more like Aeneas than Ulysses in as much as he is setting out to establish a new home rather than returning to an old one. Coincidentally, in 1976, the same year that Old Bones left Haiti in the guise of Ulysses, Toni Morrison spoke of the ‘Ulysses theme’ as it applies to black men in the U.S. primarily as a narrative of departure rather than arrival (Taylor-Guthrie 1994, 181). Laferrière here quotes a line of Homer’s Odyssey via the 1924 French translation of Victor Bérard. The passage comes from Book 6 when Ulysses has washed ashore on the island of the Phaeacians after surviving a harrowing storm at sea. He awakens completely naked, without any possessions, and not knowing where he is. But as he hears the sounds of young women playing nearby, his hunger compels him to attempt communication. Homer describes the hero’s emergence from his hiding place with a strikingly violent simile. He compares Ulysses to a powerful mountain lion confidently stalking its prey, not just in a remote wilderness but even among domesticated flocks. Bérard’s rendering captures the spirit of Homer’s words more than their literal meaning. As a summary comment about the mountain lion’s behavior (and, thereby, Ulysses’ need) he writes: c’est le ventre qui parle, ‘it is the belly that speaks’. But Homer’s Greek is rather different: κέλεται δέ ἑ γαστὴρ / μήλων πειρήσοντα καὶ ἐς πυκινὸν δόμον ἐλθεῖν, ‘His belly compelled [the mountain lion] to attack the flock and enter the crowded sheepfold’ (6.133–34). Laferrière, whose sentences tend toward a rapid staccato, must have appreciated Bérard’s laconic distillation. Earlier in Le cri . . . Old Bones has suggested that his father, too, may have departed Haiti with the help of Agoué (204). Laferrière describes what was waiting for him in Montreal in Chronique de la dérive douce (1994, Éditions VLB; translated as A Drifting Year 1997, Douglas & McIntyre), which describes his early struggles to find housing and employment as a new immigrant arriving just as Montreal was celebrating the Olympics in 1976. Hopwood 2011 pairs this book with Le cri . . . to describe Laferrière’s creation of a ‘pendulum of exile’ that spans the anticipation of leaving (in Le cri . . .) with the realities of dérive, ‘drifting,’ a euphemism for the exilic condition and ‘a coping mechanism and a way of life for the new immigrant’ (114).

‘As though Picasso were Tagging with Spraypaint’  203 46 For the connection between Césaire’s poem and the Odyssey, see McConnell 2013, 39–70. Another important engagement in L’énigme du retour is V. S. Naipul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987, Viking Press). Thus, Laferrière’s title seems to conflate Césaire’s retour with Naipul’s enigma. 47 Old Bones also confounds the stable male succession found in Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus comes home, he reunites with old Laertes and young Telemachus, but in L’énigma du retour, Old Bones plays the part of both the returning Odysseus and the dutiful Telemachus. Both Lafferières, père and fils, make the journey home; both were driven out by a Duvalier; both abandoned Marie Nelson Laferrière (Dany’s mother); the two men who look the same and share the same name can never be fully disentangled.

9

The Revolt against Silence Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) with Julia Nelson Hawkins

‘All epic is based on the visible presence of ruins’ – Derek Walcott, ‘The Muse of History’

Preface: Danticat and Antigone on Creating Dangerously Like the slightly older Dany Laferrière, Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) has built a literary career shaped in part (and even before her birth) by the Duvaliers, and she too demonstrates the importance of Antigone’s political resolve for Haiti. But one of her points about Antigone and artistic creation is that public monuments – from architectural spectacles to published works of literature –take on new political relevance in changed circumstances. Our reading of Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones as an anti-colonial anti-epic parallels the similar tension between artistic production and changing views of the past that is captured in the epigraph above by Derek Walcott. Yet whereas Walcott finds the inspiration for epic in the riddling presence of ruins as an acknowledgment of cultural and temporal change, we argue that Danticat expands that connection to encompass the anti-epic as a critique of the valorization of the ruins’ mystique. To build toward this idea, however, we need to review briefly the way that Antigone came into Haitian literature (a topic central to Chapter 6). When Morisseau-Leroy staged his Antigòn in 1953, Haiti was controlled by the anti-Communist, pro-U.S. presidency of Paul Magloire (in office 1950–56), and he debuted his play with the primary goal of giving the people of Haiti a new kind of Creole theatre in dialogue with global artistic trends. François Duvalier (not yet ‘Papa Doc’), meanwhile, was working as a doctor, having left his political post as Minister of Public Health and Labor. In 1953, politics was not the primary concern of either Morisseau-Leroy or Duvalier, despite the obvious political implications of the former’s Antigòn and the latter’s noirisme or black nationalism. This all changed as President Magloire’s regime crumbled and Duvalier announced his candidacy for the 1957 election. Having won the presidency, Duvalier intended to recoup the revolutionary ambitions of Dessalines, but instead he soon became the tyrannical ‘Papa Doc’. Amid this governmental transition, DOI: 10.4324/9780367824266-13

The Revolt against Silence  205 Morisseau-Leroy’s play became an anti-Duvalierist rallying cry. The performances outside Haiti fulfilled the playwright’s ambitions to have Haitian literature and theater engage with wider trends, but the play’s message also became more sharply political. By the time that Morisseau-Leroy published Wa Kreyon in 1978 (Chapter 7), he was thinking of Antigòn and her relationship to Kreyon in terms that were not only explicitly political but also specifically anti-Duvalierist. This politicization of Antigone can be sensed also in Dany Laferrière’s Le cri des oiseaux fous (Chapter 8), which describes a (possibly fictional) 1976 restaging of MorisseauLeroy’s Antigòn that reacts to the assassination of Gasner Raymond at the hands of Jean-Claude, ‘Baby Doc,’ Duvalier. The Haitian tradition of returning to Antigone takes on differently politicized implications in the dramatic setting of 1976 and the publication of Laferrière’s novel in 2000. Danticat effects something similar by layering evocations of Antigone in ‘Create Dangerously’, the first essay in a collection by the same name published in 2010 (1–20).1 Antigone emerges toward the end of Danticat’s discussion of the creation myths that shape writers’ careers. Her own creation myth does not begin with Antigone but, rather, with the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin in Port-au-Prince in 1964, five years before she was born in the Bel Air district of the capital.2 These two men, whose executions parallel the deaths of earlier revolutionaries, such as Mackandal (c. 1758), Vincent Ogé (1791), Jean-Pierre BoyerBazelais (1883) and Charlemagne Péralte (1919), had fled Papa Doc’s Haiti and returned as members of the small insurgent force known as Jeune Haiti (‘Young Haiti’) that sought to oust Duvalier. With most of their brothers-in-arms already dead, Numa and Drouin were taken alive, and Danticat recounts their execution in detail, based on a combination of archival documents and conversations with older family and friends who had been in Port-au-Prince at the time. In this theater of state-sponsored violence, Papa Doc closed the schools and ordered children, adults and especially journalists to attend the spectacle. Danticat describes for her readers the scene that she watches play out on old news reels. Two poles are erected in front of the cemetery. Numa and Drouin are brought forth and bound. Blindfolds are offered. A priest speaks words to each man that are lost to the silent footage. The crowd fidgets in the sun. Then seven soldiers arrive, space themselves appropriately, raise their rifles and, on command, shoot the two men. Publications in Haiti and the U.S. describe the crowd as enthusiastically supportive of Duvalier’s punishment of these renegades, but Danticat’s personal contacts remember Numa and Drouin as patriots and heroes. The public execution of these two men is not merely a defining moment in Danticat’s inherited memory. She claims their narrative as the creation myth in which the roots of her career have taken hold, and, as Anja Bandau describes it, their rebellious disobedience ‘gains the status of a haunting symbol and a trigger of creation’ (2021, 219). Thus triggered to creativity, Danticat spins a web of narratives around their deaths that speak to the dangers of artistic creation. For example, in the weeks before the execution of Drouin and Numa, the book club in Bel Air, Le Club de Bonne Humeur, had been reading Camus’ play Caligula (1944), and the members were contemplating a public performance. The legendary anecdotes

206  The Revolt against Silence about that most erratic and brutal Roman emperor must have been a risky choice in the years after Duvalier’s recovery from his 1959 heart attack and hours-long coma (for which see Chapter 7). Rumors circulated that the Haitian president had become increasingly paranoid, mentally compromised, and violently impulsive. Given Camus’ emphasis on Caligula slaughtering Roman citizens as a response to his grief for the death of his sister, the play’s depiction of the emperor offered damning parallels to the Haitian president. As mentioned in the previous chapter, René Depestre may have been influence by Camus’ play when he described Papa Doc as ‘a tropical Caligula’ (1969, 7). After the execution of Numa and Drouin, the idea of a public performance of Camus’ play was predictably scrapped, and Danticat’s father vaguely recalled clandestine readings, in which a few members of the book club would gather, don sheets as make-shift togas, and whisper recitations of a few scenes. These intersections of theatrical and political violence and the whispered secrets of artistic reaction are woven into the backstory of Danticat’s life, but as a creation myth, the scenario allows her to move forward and backward in time. She notes that the mere suggestion of artistic expression could be understood as a form of political resistance and critique, as when she describes her neighborhood’s habit of reacting to new waves of political oppression with the coded phrase ‘someone should put on a play’ (8). Because any engagement with the arts could so easily be seen as a form of political opposition, readers had to hide their books, actors had to limit their audiences, and authors could not publish overt criticism safely. Here Danticat begins to turn her thinking toward Antigone. She emphasizes how dangerous domestic artistic creation was in this period, and how this drove people toward classic writers (broadly understood) whose words could not be erased, forgotten or denied – writers like Voltaire, George Sand, and Pierre Corneille, but also Sophocles and Euripides. ‘Because those writers who were still in Haiti, not yet exiled or killed, could not freely perform or print their own words outright, many of them turned, or returned, to the Greeks’ (9). By (re)turning to the Greeks, Haitian authors and readers could strike ‘a dangerous balance between silence and art’ (10). They could ‘create dangerously’ – the phrase that Danticat hacks from a speech given by Camus in 1957 and that she honors and embraces as her title and guiding image.3 From this foundation Danticat praises anyone who engages in ‘creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive’ (11). For Danticat, this vision of artistic creation and consumption alternates between sharply historical application (as in the case of whispering Camus’ Caligula after the execution of Numa and Drouin) and transhistorical relevance. The latter can be sensed in her primary examples of Haitian writers turning to the Greeks. The adaptations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone by Franck Fouché (1955, now lost) and Morisseau-Leroy (1953, for which, see Chapter 6) that Danticat references were staged prior to the rise of Duvalier and were not, therefore, created under a cloud of violent political oppression. But, as she argues, those moments of creation allow later readers or audiences (as in Laferrière’s description of the performance of Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn in 1976 in Le cri des oiseaux fous)

The Revolt against Silence  207 to see political relevance and build community and solidarity through the shared experience of art. After meditating on Laferrière’s claim in Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008) that he takes on the cultural identity of his readers (and perhaps also thinking about the role of Antigone in his Le cri . . .), Danticat connects her creation myth to the tradition of Haitian Antigones and wonders: ‘Is there a border between Antigone’s desire to bury her brother and the Haitian mother of 1964 who desperately wants to take her dead son’s body out of the street to give him a proper burial, knowing that if she does this she too may die?’ (16). By connecting Morisseau-Leroy’s pre-Duvalier Antigòn with Duvalier’s theatrical execution of Numa and Drouin, Danticat shows how ‘Sophocles too became a Haitian writer’ (16), mirroring Laferrière’s similar claim in Le cri .  .  . that ‘Sophocles may have been a Haitian peasant’ (Sophocle était peut-être un paysan haïten, 39). This Haitian Sophocles is welcomed into Danticat’s oeuvre not as a colonizer but on her terms. Nadège Clitandre shows, for example, that not all aspects of Sophocles are welcome. In her interpretation of The Dew Breaker she argues that the riddle-solving, goal-driven Sophoclean Oedipus is rejected in favor of the more open-ended, Sophoclean Antigone, balanced between the deaths of her two brothers (2018, 136).4 At times Danticat similarly rejects Antigone in order to frame a scenario, as in ‘The Other Side of the Water’ when she describes the surprisingly un-dramatic and ‘sanitized’ experience of helping return the body of her dead cousin Marius from the U.S. to Haiti by saying that there was ‘nothing Antigone about it’ (2010, 94).5 For Danticat, writing and reading can (and should) always be dangerous acts, even when political oppression is not so direct and obvious as it was under the Duvaliers. For self-described immigrant artists such as herself (and even for writers such as Morisseau-Leroy in 1953, who was not operating under a tyrant), she shows that ‘though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence – still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere’ (18). To read Camus’ Caligula in 1964 as Danticat describes or to stage Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn in 1976 as Laferrière recounts in Le cri . . . is to engage in a process of dangerous creativity. In addition to this, Danticat claims, the acts of writing about those moments, even from the comparative safety of Montreal in 2000 or Miami in 2010, participate in the tradition of creating dangerously. With this prefatory vision for the role of the arts in mind, we move toward Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, which dramatizes the most traumatic moment of Haitian history between the U.S. occupation and the rise of Duvalierism: the 1937 Parsley Massacre. In Danticat’s historical fiction, the body of the novel’s main character Amabelle, disfigured by Dominican soldiers, resonates among other female figures in Danticat’s corpus who have suffered violence as a result of political chaos, such as Alèrte Bélance, mutilated by Haitian militants in the 1991 coup (2010, 73–85), and the fictional Madan Roger, who suffers similar treatment in Danticat’s ‘Children of the Sea,’ a story rooted in that same 1991 coup (1996, 1–29). In her stories and essays, Danticat rejects the canon’s patriarchal portrayal of women by making real and realistic female characters from Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora her central focus, by giving them the opportunity to tell their own stories, and by affording them the

208  The Revolt against Silence dignity and humanity they are so often denied in other discourses. Before discussing the novel directly, however, we need to explain how we read her work. Danticat’s Virgilian Echo Chamber Danticat’s fiction does not engage with Greek or Roman material as explicitly as do most of the other texts studied in this volume. Nowhere does she build an entire project around the overt acts of hacking that clearly shape Bergeaud’s Stella (Chapter 2), Hibbert’s Romulus (Chapter 4) or Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn (Chapter 6). Her novels and short stories do not include scenes such as Laferrière’s extended depiction of Antigone/Antigòn in Le cri des oiseaux fous (Chapter  8). She does not reference classical material in her non-fictional writing as often as did Firmin (Chapter 3) or Price-Mars (Chapter 5). Indeed, we find few classical ‘intertexts’ so overtly situated in Danticat’s work.6 It is precisely this fact, we argue, that makes her such a powerful hacker of the Classics. Alessandro Barchiesi pointed out in 1997 that intertextual studies of Latin literature tend to be preoccupied with complexity as a type of beauty, which he labels an ‘insidious undertone’ (1997, 222) in the field, and this observation underpins our approach here. In the same volume, Stephen Hinds argues that ‘. . . all allusion entails some reflexion upon identity, upon selfhood and otherness’ (1997, 120). Danticat’s corpus invites readers to go deeper down these avenues of criticism, whereby traditional intertextuality studies, imbued with an ‘insidious undertone,’ as outlined by Barchiesi, metastasizes in Danticat’s sugar cane fields into an oppressive over-seer.7 In the absence of such traditional signaling of the canon in The Farming of Bones we hear ‘echoes’ of the classical past that critique how the canon is implicit in the genocide and atrocities of colonialism. As we will show below, this decentering of the canon (which contrasts so sharply with the anti-colonial engagements with canonical material explored in earlier chapters of this book) parallels Danticat’s strategy of decentering oppressive figures like Rafael Trujillo, Henri Christophe and the Duvaliers. We take the idea of the echo as the organizing principle of Danticat’s work from Clitandre (2018, passim), who uses Echo, the mythical character and her connection to the modern idea of an ‘echo chamber,’ as an interpretive lens through which to read many of Danticat’s texts. From this angle, Clitandre does not need to insist that Danticat was thinking of Echo, though perhaps she was (and she certainly has spoken about her writing in terms of an echo chamber). By following Clitandre in thinking about Echo while reading Danticat, we have heard a contrapuntal motif of Virgilian resonances within the emotional stratigraphy of The Farming of Bones about the traumas of colonization.8 From this, we argue that the colonial canon and Virgil, in particular, need not be referenced explicitly, precisely because these texts are utterly systemic in the context of European coloniality. We suggest that Danticat’s oeuvre manifests not the intertexts or allusions so valued in traditional classical philology but, rather, what Walcott calls ‘the visible ruins of epic’ and specifically the ruins of Virgilian epic, which has been so deeply implicated in the ‘civilizing mission’ of European colonization.

The Revolt against Silence  209 Our interpretation of The Farming of Bones harmonizes with what Clitandre calls Danticat’s ‘subversion of Western myths of displacement’ (Clitandre 2021, 23). Danticat’s writing responds to – critiques, re-writes, echoes in changed circumstances – the traditional literary canon, that web of texts and traditions where Virgil’s ancestral influence can be encountered at many points, such as Beowulf or Dante’s Commedia, even if one never reads Virgil. The influence of the canon’s echoes can also be felt in texts that resist, expand or even reject canonical authority, such as Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Anniad (a subsection of Annie Allen, 1949) or the moment in Dany Laferrière’s L’énigme du retour (2009) when ‘Old Bones’ encounters a man who describes his retirement as ‘a chance to reread the Aeneid’ (du temps pour relire l’Énéide, 271). By reading The Farming of Bones as an antiVirgilian epic that deconstructs some of the tropes and ethics foregrounded in Virgil’s Georgics and, especially, Aeneid, we position Danticat within what Clitandre describes as ‘a tradition of African American women’s classical revision of female (sexual) oppression’ (6). Danticat’s hacking, that is, takes aim at the entire patriarchal (colonial, imperialist, capitalist, sexist) structuring of the canon as an extension of and foundation for Euro-U.S. cultural hegemony. Danticat’s echo chamber, built on the ruins of Virgilian epic, causes the Greco-Roman past to reverberate with the harmonics of the Caribbean as a colonized space. Virgil’s own corpus supports Clitandre’s interpretation of Danticat’s oeuvre in terms of Echo and echoes. From the Eclogues to the Georgics to the Aeneid, Virgil’s works feature echoes that define his literary program. The Eclogues open with the programmatic image of the shepherd Tityrus teaching the bucolic landscape to ‘echo,’ resonare (Ec. 1.5), with his songs. The Georgics, in a passage that is crucial for our interpretation of The Farming of Bones, employs nature’s echoes (resonantia/resonare) as a didactic tool in teaching the farmer the rhythms of the almanac (Geo. 1.358, 486). And in the Aeneid, the Virgilian echo takes on cosmic proportions when Queen Dido ululates upon discovering Aeneas’ betrayal of their love, and ‘the cosmos echoes with her wailing’ (Aen. 4.668: resonat magnis plangoribus aether). Dido’s cosmic lament is recast as the fall of a great house at the close of the epic. As Aeneas’ forces push forward in their quest to conquer the Latins (the people of central Italy where Aeneas has landed), the Latin Queen Amata looked out and despaired at not seeing Turnus, their greatest champion. In a frenzy, she hanged herself and ‘the palace echoed everywhere with lamentations’ (Aen. 12.607: resonant late plangoribus aedes). Amata’s husband, King Latinus, recognizes that her death spells the downfall of his city (urbis ruina, 610) and that the foreign invader, Aeneas, will win the war and fulfill his prophecy of founding a new, eternal empire. In our reading of Danticat, these echoing susurrations of Virgil’s Arcadian bees are re-tuned to the resonance resulting from the breaking of the epic genre.9 Virgil – The Civilizing Classic in Hispaniola Virgil’s Aeneid, which T. S. Eliot called ‘the classic of all Europe,’ already played an outsized part in the active colonization of the Caribbean and the Americas, through a series of European poets who drew upon the Virgilian tale as a model for

210  The Revolt against Silence composing panegyrics of the conquest of the ‘New World.’ Philip Hardie, a classicist, and Elise Bartosik-Velez, a Caribbeanist, have recently studied this material from different disciplinary perspectives, but both agree that the flexibility of Virgil’s narrative of heroic men sailing west to find a new home offered an obvious and powerful model for depicting European colonization efforts.10 Both show how ethically problematic it was to overlay the teleological narrative of epic and the bestiary of mythology onto the historical process of expanding European hegemony. Bartosik-Velez frames her analysis in terms of the idea of translatio imperii (‘the transferal of imperial dominion’) and ‘the dominance of the Virgilian frame in Western thought, according to which territorial expansion and colonization were often interpreted as a contemporary reenactment of the Aeneid plot’ (60). In Giulio Cesare Stella’s two-book Columbeis (1585, 1589), for example, the role of Juno as the divine opponent of Aeneas is transferred to Satan as the new antagonist to Columbus, who plays the part of a new Aeneas (Hardie 2014, 154).11 Juno and Satan provide similar narrative resistance to the hero’s journey, but no god in GrecoRoman polytheism was evil like the Christian Satan. This means that, whereas Juno opposed Aeneas for reasons that are understandable within the logic of myth and she ultimately reconciled with him, the figure of Satan simplifies the Virgilian narrative into a blunt opposition between Euro-Christian goodness and the evil forces of nature and indigenous cultures. Any resistance to Columbus’ ‘civilizing’ mission thus falls under the auspices of Satan. As this revised Virgilian system spills into the human realm, the peoples Columbus encountered in Hispaniola and elsewhere take on the role of monsters and savages, leading to ‘the easy identification of hostile natives with the classical Cyclopes [the plural of Cyclops]’ (ibid, 159), the most famous example from Homer and Virgil of semi-human, un-civilized, a-social monstrosities. Similarly, Girolamo Fracastoro’s Syphilis (1530) draws extensively on the Aeneid, as well as Virgil’s Georgics, in locating the cure for syphilis (the guaiacum tree) within the list of Columbus’ discoveries on Hispaniola.12 In the Europeans’ militant efforts to secure this precious resource, Hardie finds a ‘wanton violence’ on the part of the invaders that lacks the Trojans’ more compelling need to find a new home. Since Troy had been destroyed, Aeneas was a refugee displaced by the violent destruction of his homeland who became a colonizer out of desperate need, and the framing of Columbus as a new Aeneas insidiously urges us to forget that European conquest of the Americas was driven by greed, not need. Such presentations of Columbus as the new Aeneas shape both the narrative ethics of European colonization and the place of Haitian literature within the canon. For Haiti to speak, for Haitian authors to write, they have had to emerge from the narrative positionality of those vanquished within the logic and ethics of epic as filtered through the lens of the Christian opposition between God’s goodness and Satanic evil. To accomplish this, colonized authors have found various forms of resistance, which, as demonstrated in the preceding chapters, have often engaged the figure of Antigone as an archetypal voice against patriarchal domination. But in The Farming of Bones, Danticat presents a new vision for hacking Virgilian epic in the service of her anti-colonial novel.

The Revolt against Silence  211 The Farming of Bones as Anti-epic As with her description of the execution of Numa and Drouin that took place before she was born, The Farming of Bones (1998), which won the 1999 American Book Award, retells a violent and horrific episode of Haitian history, namely the 1937 Parsley Massacre (known in Creole as kout kouto, ‘the stabbing’, and in Spanish as El Corte, ‘the cutting’), a genocidal purge in which thousands of Haitians were slaughtered by Dominican soldiers.13 Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who controlled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, sought to ‘cleanse’ his country of the large Haitian population working within its borders primarily as field workers and domestic servants. In this pogrom soldiers and vigilantes would demand that people say the Spanish word for parsley, perejil, on the assumption that Haitians ‘could not manage to trill their “r” and utter a throaty “j” to ask for parsley, to say perejil’ (Danticat 1998, 114). The militants butchered anyone whom they deemed to be Haitian, sometimes stuffing parsley in their mouths in what Gloria Anzaldúa would call ‘linguistic terrorism’ (1987, 80–81).14 The word parsley became the shibboleth to distinguish those to be killed from those allowed to survive. The Farming of Bones charts the story of Amabelle, a young Haitian woman working as a domestic servant in the Dominican village of Alegría, a hub for the sugar industry. As rumors of a Dominican purge swirl among the Haitian workers, Amabelle plans to escape back to Haiti by travelling to and crossing the Dajabón River, in which her parents had drowned when she was a child.15 Her plan was to escape with her lover Sebastien Onius and several others, but when the slaughter begins sooner than expected, their plans unravel. Amabelle is forced to leave with Sebastien’s friend Yves but without Sebastien himself. Amabelle and Yves eventually cross to safety, but only after experiencing and witnessing brutal violence and emotional and psychological terrorism. Back in Haiti Amabelle spends years searching for news of Sebastien and trying (unsuccessfully) to find companionship with Yves. When she eventually learns that Sebastien had died in the massacre, she visits the ruined opulence of Henri Christophe’s Palais Sans-Souci under the looming presence of his Citadelle Laferrière before returning to the border at Dajabón for a powerfully emotional, but also deeply ambiguous, conclusion.16 This genocide has been recounted by many artists from Hispaniola in both verbal and visual formats, but Danticat’s novel presents a version that also intersects with themes and images found in the epic poetry of Virgil.17 These connections are not made explicitly by Danticat, and thus the situation is structurally different from cases such as Bergeaud’s foregrounding of the myth of Romulus and Remus in Stella or when Morisseau-Leroy tells his audience that his Antigòn is an adaptation of an ancient story. Rather, these are echoes and ‘fuzzy connections’, supportable by evidence from the text but neither unambiguous nor overt.18 In many ways, then, this section makes the case that reading The Farming of Bones in dialogue with Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid amplifies themes in her novel by positioning them as counter-readings to the literary canon. Understood in this way, The Farming of Bones not only resists the hegemony of the canon but also reveals and resists the imperialist legacy of Virgilian epic.

212  The Revolt against Silence Like Virgil’s Aeneid, The Farming of Bones focuses on an individual’s escape from a violent conflagration by crossing of a body of water, the loss of a lover, and a culminating meditation on artistic monuments of war. Beyond this, both Danticat and Virgil reflect on civil strife as a state discourse of contagion and healing that overwhelms and perverts traditional therapeutic powers of the agrarian landscape. In Danticat’s novel, however, Virgil’s masculine, militant, wide-lens heroism is replaced by an intimacy of relationships, individuals (typical rather than heroic), and bodies that critique epic bombast as both a literary trope and as an aspect of nation-building, whether in Rome or Haiti.19 In a more overt example of such deflation of epic aspirations, Dana Munteanu analyzes Euripides’ ‘anti-epic’ critique of Homeric epic in his 5th century BCE tragedy Trojan Women (2010, 129): ‘Euripides invites his audience to contrast tragedy’s treatment of the Trojan War with its epic antecedents. The Muse no longer celebrates the glorious deeds of men and gods, as is customary in epic. Instead, she chants the bitter fate of the victims of war, who acquire immortal glory not through bravery on the battlefield but through suffering after the conquest.’ Although Danticat’s novel does not engage with Virgil as overtly or as thoroughly as Euripides does with Homer, her novel participates in a wider trend of anti-colonial literature that critiques the ethos and tropes of the literary canon. In this vein, Danticat’s title, The Farming of Bones, reiterates a common nexus of agricultural labor and human suffering while also echoing the specific image from Virgil’s Georgics of a farmer digging up bones, which we unpack below and which informs our interpretation. Farming Bones in Danticat and Virgil Danticat’s phrase ‘the farming of bones’ appears early in the novel in a speech about the suffering of Haitian laborers. An old cane cutter named Kongo mourns for his son, Joël, who has just been run down by a car, driven recklessly by Amabelle’s employer, a top military assistant to Trujillo and a key figure in the massacre to come. The senseless killing of Joël prefigures the impending genocide and brings together many of the emotional connections that unite the narrative. Kongo shares his grief with Amabelle and says that Joël is ‘lucky to no longer be a part of the cane life, travay tè pou zo, the farming of bones’ (1998, 55). Haitian workers in the Dominican sugar fields, ‘direct heirs of the field slaves’ who are ‘corporeally marked’ (Misrahi-Barak 2021, 45), farm the bone-like cane stalks and elide any distinction between the bones of human suffering and agricultural production.20 Kongo goes on to lament that the earth itself has recoiled in horror at his son’s death: ‘When he died, my son, the ground sank a few folds beneath my feet. I asked myself, how can he die so young? Did the stars visit him upon me in caprice? To teach me that a lifetime can be vast as a hundred years or sudden as a few breaths? Enjoy this one you have left. It all passes so fast. In the time it takes to draw a breath’ (116). Virgil uses a similar imbrication of bones and a pathetic fallacy of nature in his Georgics. This four-book epic, which uses farming (georgicus is the Latinized

The Revolt against Silence  213 Greek word for farming) as a political metaphor, was published around 29 BCE, soon after Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) had defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE thereby ending a long period of Roman civil strife. At the end of Book 1 Virgil transitions from a depiction of the farmer’s life to a meditation on how nature shows farmers the proper time to plant and sow (Georgics 1.461–5): denique, quid Vesper serus uehat, unde serenas uentus agat nubes, quid cogitet umidus Auster, sol tibi signa dabit. solem quis dicere falsum audeat? ille etiam caecos instare tumultus saepe monet fraudemque et operta tumescere bella. In sum, what late evening brings, the direction from which the wind drives the gentle clouds, what the rainy South wind is plotting – the sun will give you signs of all these. Who would dare say that the sun deceives us? For he often warns when secret insurrections are brewing, when treachery and covert wars are rising.21 A few lines later, this personified nature, knowing and guileless, recoils in horror at the assassination of Julius Caesar, the event that precipitated the civil war that Octavian (Caesar’s adoptive son) had just won. Nature gives powerful omens of the ordeal to come: the sun does not shine, animals wail, Mt. Etna erupts, the Alps shake, ghosts emerge from graves and speak like men, rivers stop flowing, the earth splits open, statues weep, and blood bubbles up from wells. Virgil next cuts from the assassination that precipitated civil strife to the distant future, when a farmer unwittingly digs up the bones of those who died in the Civil Wars, conjuring a future where the soil produces bones and death, rather than crops and sustenance (Georgics 1.493–497): scilicet et tempus ueniet, cum finibus illis agricola incuruo terram molitus aratro exesa inueniet scabra robigine pila, aut grauibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanis grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris.

495

Surely a time will come when a farmer in those parts, working the soil with his curved plow, will find spears eaten away by rust and mold, or with his heavy hoe he will strike empty helmets. Then he will marvel at the huge bones of these upturned graves. The farmer’s land preserves the memory of such violence longer than does the human community. The situations in The Farming of Bones and Georgics are in many ways quite different, but both Danticat’s Kongo and Virgil’s narrator construct images of

214  The Revolt against Silence farming bones that blend agriculture, civil strife and the idea that nature might react sympathetically to human suffering. Danticat presents a more personal and intimate focus than does Virgil, and her account of the sinking ground and deceptive stars perceived by a grieving father feels less oratorical than Virgil’s sprawling map of nature’s reactions to Caesar’s assassination across the entire Roman world. But as the Virgilian narrator asks ‘who would dare say that the sun deceives us?,’ the sentiment lands close to Kongo’s fears that the heavens have played tricks on him. Virgil’s truth-telling sun recedes into a constellation of deceiving stars, much as Kongo expresses his heartache in the dark of night. This image of the farmer, who harvests bones, links Virgil’s Georgics and Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. Kongo, an agricultural laborer given the chance to speak, unlike the nameless farmer in Virgil’s poem, becomes the voice of that wisdom. According to Kongo, because the life of the cane cutter is soul-crushing pain, it is better that Joël is dead. This is a variation of the morbid ‘Wisdom of Silenus,’ articulated at the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (1224–27): ‘Not to be born at all is your best option, and second best, once you’re born, is to go back where you came from as fast as you can.’22 Virgil sharpens this pessimistic idea and applies it to the life of a farmer in the Georgics (3.66–68): ‘Those best of days are the first to flee for wretched mortals. Diseases and pitiful old age and toil creep in, and cruel, unforgiving death sweeps it all away.’23 The Sophoclean passage speaks to a generalized existential crisis and the inevitability of suffering during one’s life, but Virgil’s more limited articulation of the challenges facing a subsistence farmer comes closer to Kongo’s lament, which is amplified by the colonial history of sugar production and slave labor in the Caribbean. In this way, Danticat crafts a version of the Wisdom of Silenus that accounts not just for the universality of human suffering but also for the specifically oppressive histories that have shaped so many peoples’ experiences in the postColumbian Americas.24 These scenes that focus on the pain of a life of labor also connect to theories of political control. For Virgil, writing under the patronage of Rome’s first emperor, Augustan propaganda insisted that good leadership, now in the form of a wise and powerful emperor, leads to social stability that defends against civil strife and thereby eases the burdens of agricultural life. At a basic level, this underlines the obvious point that social chaos, such as civil war, jeopardizes the annual cycle of planting and reaping upon which Rome’s food-stores depend. But on a deeper, more metaphorical level, the Virgilian passage about the assassination of Caesar claims that nature can respond to human actions.25 Stable governance leads not only to the basic confidence that rich harvests will be feasible but also to the impressionistic ideology that Aetna and the Alps, bookends of the Italian peninsula, will remain tranquil and harmonious allies of Rome because of the stability of the Augustan regime. Danticat, too, understands that stability can be a social good, and, had Trujillo balked at carrying out the 1937 Massacre, Haitians living in the Dominican Republic like Amabelle might have been able to continue working for more affluent Dominicans. Yet harmonious stability was probably not possible in these historical

The Revolt against Silence  215 circumstances. The situation on both sides of the border had developed through histories that have pitted the eastern and western sides of Hispaniola against each other.26 The two countries emerged from contrasting (primarily) Spanish and French colonial era narratives, yet Dominican independence is celebrated not from Spain but from the Haitian occupation from 1822 to 1844. Dan-el Padilla Peralta has discussed the semi-mythical case of the murder of the ‘virgins of Galindo’, in which the rape and death of three girls from Galindo, Santo Domingo came to be blamed on Haitian occupiers, even though the earliest evidence makes no mention of the perpetrator being Haitian. Peralta goes on to compare the emotional power of this anti-Haitian narrative to the Roman myth of the rape of Lucretia by the last Roman king, Tarquin the Arrogant (a legend also described briefly in Chapter 2), as a national rallying cry against oppression. In this case, the myth that inspires resistance also involved ‘scripting Dominican identity as classically pure and white and its Haitian counterpart as dark and criminal’ (Peralta 2020, 90).27 Lingering resentment about Haitian expansion overlays onto a racialized distinction, expressed frequently in The Farming of Bones, that valorizes the typically lighter skin tones of Dominicans compared to the darker Haitian bodies. More recently, both nations had languished under the paired U.S. military occupations of Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), actions undertaken in the name of fostering stability. As Trujillo framed the narrative in the 1930’s in terms of a growing threat from Haitians working within Dominican borders, historical resentments and racial animosity combined to cast Haitians as a dangerous contagion that needed to be purged in order to promote the health of the Dominican nation. Okparanta (2008, 190) describes this Dominican propaganda as deriving from ‘the abject – the undesirable haunting by the African presence – that remains of the Dominican Republic’s past in the form of dark-skinned individuals.’ Trujillo’s rhetorical campaign can be paralleled in Augustan discussions of imperial power as a bulwark of Roman health (as discussed later in this chapter), but no Roman author – not even those like Virgil or Horace who had initially fought against Octavian during Civil Wars – emerged from anything like the systemic domination and economic oppression that provide the backstory Kongo’s life. Opening Lines Much as Danticat’s title and, through it, Kongo’s grief connect to Virgilian presentations of agricultural labor, another set of Virgilian and Homeric intersections can be heard in the first line of her novel: ‘His name is Sebastien Onius’ (1). Virgil’s Aeneid opens with the words arma virumque cano, ‘I sing of arms and the man’. The first two words (arma virumque, ‘arms and a/the man’) often served as an alternate or quasi-title, and the full three-word statement announces Virgil’s reworking of the two Homeric epics.28 The Iliad, whose martial themes echo in Virgil’s arma, begins by invoking the battlefield rage of Achilles: ‘Sing the rage [of Achilles], goddess’ (μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ,), whereas the Odyssey prefigures Virgil’s line by declaring an interest in ‘the man’: ‘speak to me about the man, muse’ (ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα). These epic gambits are formulaic, and Virgil’s own hacking

216  The Revolt against Silence of the Homeric code prepares his audience for a story that will combine an Iliadic militarism (books 7–12) with a hero’s return (books 1–6; in this case, Aeneas’ ‘return’ to Italy, a region he had never visited but where he had ancestral connections). Whereas Homer crafted separate epics on each theme, for Virgil the man is also the master of arms, as if monopolizing violence were a byword for this man or, perhaps, for manliness itself. The Farming of Bones suggests a different type of hacking with its first sentence as Danticat focuses on a man whose relationship to arms will cast the novel in an anti-epic register: ‘His name is Sebastien Onius’ (1). Homer asks for inspiration from a female divinity to help him tell each of his tales (sing goddess, speak muse), and Virgil eliminates such divine mediation to claim that he sings his own story (cano, ‘I sing’). Danticat, by contrast, begins with a decidedly human and female narrator, Amabelle Désir, who speaks a man into existence through the power of her memory and voice. Both Homer and Virgil spotlighted a heroic man (Greek: andra, Latin: virum) who dominated his community and his narrative – leading armies, charting paths for their followers, and interacting with gods, kings and amorous females. Odysseus and Aeneas are towering heroic figures, who give their names to their poems, since Odyssey and Aeneid are just the Anglicized versions of titles that mean ‘the story of Odysseus’ and ‘the story of Aeneas’. Danticat’s Sebastien Onius has a name that echoes Greek and Latin etymologies, since Sebastês is the Greek equivalent of Augustus, but he will not play the part of Odysseus or Aeneas in her novel.29 Instead, Danticat has Amabelle say his name in order to create ‘a revolt against silence’ (2010, 11) – the silence of history understood exclusively as the chronology of ‘famous men’ (1998, 280) like Odysseus and Aeneas, the silencing of political violence that sweeps away individuals in its torrent, the silencing of time, as memories fade, and the capital-s Silence presented by Marlene NourbeSe Philip, who has published two volumes of poetry and prose that meditate on the importance of silence in Caribbean women’s histories (1989 and 1991).30 Such forms of silencing have contributed to the marginalization of the Parsley Massacre, itself a case study in the silencing of narratives about marginalized communities. This pattern of silencing and marginalization informs Trouillot’s description of the Haitian Revolution as ‘unthinkable’, with the dual valences of being impossible to anticipate for the colonial masters of Saint-Domingue, who were blinkered by their racist assumptions about African peoples, and impossible to accept for Euro-U.S. leaders and academics, who could not or would not accept the importance of the sequence of events that led to Haitian independence, especially when compared to narratives about the eighteenth-century revolutions in the U.S. and France.31 Throughout The Farming of Bones, Danticat gives a name and a voice to Amabelle Désir, just as Amabelle will do the same for Sebastien Onius. The result will not be a restored kingship (as in the Odyssey) or the foundation story for a rising empire (as in the Aeneid) but, rather, the preservation of cherished memories in the face of totalizing power and a demand that the victims of the Parsley Massacre not be forgotten. Sebastien Onius is neither the victor nor the master of violence. He, like Amabelle, is a victim of such epic masculinity, yet, as we will see, Danticat

The Revolt against Silence  217 imbues Sebastien after his death with powerful, Vodou spiritual qualities that transcend his victimhood. In an essay originally published in 1974, Derek Walcott wrote about the challenges that authors face when confronting ‘history, that Medusa of the New World’. For those who manage to avoid petrification, history becomes a ‘fiction, subject to a fitful muse, memory,’ and ‘everything depends on whether we write this fiction through the memory of hero or victim’ (1998, 36–37). The Farming of Bones is a wonderful example of such historical fiction told from the perspective of the victims, though Danticat, by giving Amabelle a voice, and Amabelle, by speaking the story of Sebastien, become something far more assertive than we might assume from the word ‘victim’. By refusing to be silenced in the face of political domination and state violence, Amabelle recoups the power of Antigòn’s empowering No! Speech and memory work to resist victimization and to process trauma.32 Monuments of Empire In The Farming of Bones the politics of violence erupts most immediately from the figure of Trujillo, sometimes described (though not by Danticat) as the Caesar of the Caribbean, and in that sense the story might initially seem to reiterate the Dominican-Haitian divide that bifurcates Hispaniola.33 But Danticat raises a far more revolutionary cry in her novel, since Trujillo, for all the opprobrium he so richly deserves, is not a unique aberration but, rather, one example of an all too common pattern of political violence.34 Danticat’s personal biography makes it difficult to avoid sensing the lurking presence of the Duvaliers beneath the surface of her prose, though they play no part in the novel or in Parsley Massacre (which Trujillo perpetrated in 1937, when the elder Duvalier was a recent college graduate). As she said in a recent interview, the Duvalier era ‘haunts us inside our families’ (Clitandre 2021, 21). While the subsequent horrors of the Duvalier era may be implied in Danticat’s novel, other political regimes collude more obviously against the likes of Amabelle and Sebastien, such as the U.S., which had recently occupied both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the weak figure of Haitian President Sténio Vincent, who was elected in 1934, the same year that the U.S. ended its occupation. After nearly two-decades of political domination by the U.S. and the corresponding denial of any chance to foster a robust pipeline of leaders and civil servants, it is little wonder that Vincent’s Haiti devolved into a power vacuum that could neither deter nor meaningfully respond to the Parsley Massacre. Danticat makes this point explicit when she describes a crowded gathering, where someone compares the president to the revolutionary heroes: ‘When Dessalines, Toussaint, Henry, when those men walked the earth, we were a strong nation. Those men would go to war to defend our blood. In all this [i.e., the Parsley Massacre], our so-called president says nothing, our Papa Vincent – our poet – he says nothing at all to this affront to the children of Dessalines, the children of Toussaint, the children of Henry’ (212). The U.S. and Vincent give shape to the wider political and historical context of the Parsley Massacre, but the most significant counterpart to Trujillo’s Dominican

218  The Revolt against Silence Republic in The Farming of Bones comes from that same revolutionary past, namely Henri Christophe’s reign as King Henry I from 1811–1820.35 Christophe’s biography is partially shrouded in legend, but he is usually described as having been born into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean (perhaps St. Kitts). He may have fought at the Battle of Savannah, Georgia in 1779 with the Chasseurs-Voluntaries (a regiment of black soldiers from Saint-Domingue) and later worked as a hotelier in Cap-Français (today Cap-Haïtien). Most probably freed already by 1791, Christophe became one of the main leaders of the Haitian Revolution. He served as a top lieutenant to Toussaint Louverture and then to Jean-Jacques Dessalines before becoming the president and then king of the northern part of Haiti upon the latter’s assassination in 1806 (at which time Alexandre Pétion became President of the Republic of Haiti in the south). Compared to other heroes of the Revolution, Christophe has the misfortune of taking the reins of government only after the revolution proper had been concluded. Unlike the charismatic Louverture, who galvanized a network of insurrections into a well-trained revolutionary army and codified opposition to slavery in Saint-Domingue in his 1801 Constitution, and the uncompromising Dessalines, who defeated France and declared independence, Christophe can look like a king looking for a cause. This is certainly the case in The Farming of Bones where he appears primarily in terms of his two massive building projects, the opulent Palais Sans-Souci and the Citadelle Laferrière (both discussed in the Introduction).36 These two structures fostered an image of cultured refinement and martial impregnability, respectively, but they were created at a devastating cost to the populace, as countless citizens were forced into the back-breaking labor of constructing these buildings with soldiers turned into something all too close to plantation overseers. As the human toll of his reign continued to grow, Christophe suffered a stroke and was ousted, famously killing himself with a silver (or in some version, gold) bullet in 1820. The Sans Souci was looted, and the Citadelle was soon abandoned. Christophe’s story may feel irrelevant to a novel about events in 1937, but the physical presence of the ruins of Sans Souci and Laferrière become important points of emotional reference for Danticat’s Amabelle. This is hardly surprising, and Walcott (in a different essay) offers an ennobling reflection on these ruins as seen from the perspective of his boyhood self: ‘. . . they seemed to him [i.e., to Walcott as a boy], then, those slave-kings, Dessalines and Christophe, men who had structured their own despair. Their tragic bulk was massive as a citadel at twilight. They were our only noble ruins’ (1998, 11). Walcott conflates the men and the buildings, recognizing tragedy in their decrepitude but still finding them to be noble. He goes on to admit that with more mature perspective those revolutionaries may have been ‘squalid fascists’, but he never quite gives up his childhood awe at their audacity. Amabelle begins from a position perhaps not much different from that of Walcott. When she was a little girl, before her parents had died trying to cross the Dajabón River to enter the Dominican Republic, her father had taken her to the Citadelle Laferrière, and he ‘loved to recount this tale of Henry I, as slave who . . . built forts like the great citadel to keep intruders away’ (46). Back in Haiti as an adult trying to process her grief and loss, she initially finds comfort in recalling this moment when

The Revolt against Silence  219 the loving presence of her father paired with Christophe’s benevolent and paternal desire to ‘keep intruders away’. On a sleepless night, she lulls herself to sleep with this recollection of the sense of safety the Citadel conveyed: ‘Each time I closed my eyes I saw the [Dajabón] river and imagined Sebastien . . . drowning the way my mother and father . . . had. To escape these thoughts, I envisioned Henry I’s citadel as I had seen it again that afternoon, its closeness to the sky, its distance from the river. With my childhood visions of being inside of it, protected, I fell asleep’ (227). This sense that the ruins of Christophe’s Haiti can offer comfort and perhaps inspiration erodes in the same late chapter of the novel that contains a version of a famous Virgilian line. Soon after the assassination of Trujillo on May 30, 1961 and therefore twenty-four years after the Massacre, Amabelle is speaking with Man Rapadou, the mother of Yves (Sebastien’s friend and Amabelle’s companion in her escape from the Dominican Republic). The women find solace in shared grief, and Man Rapadou confesses a shameful secret that she has long kept hidden. During the U.S. occupation, she discovered that her husband had been turned by the ‘Yankis’ and had agreed to work for them as a spy. In response to this, which Man Rapadou describes as a poisoning of his mind, she made the painful decision to poison him to protect members of the resistance, whose lives were now in danger because of his complicity with the occupiers.37 Years later Man Rapadou continues to struggle with her decisions and trauma, and, wiping a tear from her cheek, she says: ‘I often hear that silence is holiness, and still I’m not holy . . . I believed then that fortune would favor the brave. How young I was. There are cures for everything except death. I wish the sun had set on my days when I was still a young, happy woman, whose man was by her side, with joy in his eyes and honor in his heart’ (277–278). Here, Danticat articulates yet another version of the Wisdom of Silenus, but this one also echoes two specific passages from canonical texts. Man Rapadou’s claim that ‘there are cures for everything except death,’ parallels a similar sentiment from the ‘Ode to Man’, a passage in Sophocles’ Antigone in which the chorus describes all the many advances humans have made against the corrosive forces of nature. At the climax, the chorus sings: ‘He is endlessly inventive. At a loss for nothing he strides into the future. Only Hades [i.e., death] can he not put to flight, even though he has devised escapes from the deadliest of diseases’ (359–361).38 In Sophocles’ play this idea that humans have found cures for nearly everything but death sounds ennobling and triumphalist in isolation, but within the wider context of the play it must be read in terms of the fact that a woman, not a man, has challenged Creon’s authority and that Creon’s sense of control will soon be shattered. For Man Rapadou, however, that shattering experience is already in the past, since she could not find a way to cure her husband of his colonized condition and resorted to killing him. There is no hubris in her words, only regret. Alternately, her words may suggest that the U.S. occupation fostered a kind of incurable living death among Haitians, much as Frankétienne (1975) and René Depestre (1979) have written novels about the zombification of entire towns as a metaphor

220  The Revolt against Silence for the necropolitical impact of Duvalierism. Read against the canonical statement by Sophocles, however, Man Rapadou’s words reveal a chasm between the false confidence of a Creon, who at least seems to determine his own fate, and the brutal realism of someone whose marriage was destroyed by the disempowering impact of living under a military occupation. Such falsely triumphant optimism also informs the scene in Aeneid 10, in which Turnus, the leader of the doomed Italian forces, hectors his troops as they prepare to face Aeneas’ Trojan forces (280–84): . . . nunc coniugis esto quisque suae tectique memor, nunc magna referto facta, patrum laudes. ultro occurramus ad undam dum trepidi egressisque labant vestigia prima. audentis Fortuna iuvat. Now let each man take thought for his wife and home, now recall the great deeds and glories of our ancestors. Let us charge them right at the shore, when they are hesitant and their feet first touch the land. Fortune favors the brave! That last statement, so lofty and laconic, invited adaptation already in later antiquity. Indeed, although Virgil’s version is the most famous, the same idea had already been used by Terence, possibly suggesting an African pedigree for the quip, in his Phormio, staged in 151 BCE, when he wrote that fortes fortuna adiuvat, ‘fortune favors the strong’ (205). Later, in the middle of the first century CE, Seneca has his Medea twist Virgil’s words in this way: fortuna fortes metuit, ignavos permit, ‘Fortune fears the strong, crushes cowards’ (Medea, 159). In later eras, adaptations of Virgil’s phrase multiply in a vast array of historical and cultural contexts. As with the Caesarian phrase ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ (discussed in the Introduction), ‘fortune favors the bold’ has become largely detached from its original source and context and exists within a thriving rhetorical ecology that transcends citational precision. For these reasons it is irrelevant to ask whether Danticat had Virgil in mind or not when she crafted her own version of this phrase. What is important is that she has made the slogan far more poignant and retrospective by shifting the tense and mood of Man Rapadou’s words, (‘I believed then that fortune would favor the brave’), showing us that her female survivor has learned a truth more traumatic and honest than can be found in Turnus’ haranguing of his troops. Had Turnus survived and lived out his days in menial service to Aeneas, perhaps he might have expressed ideas similar to those of Man Rapadou, but Virgil’s epic has no space for such reflection, and the frailty and hubris of Turnus’ words are revealed in his death. After hearing Man Rapadou’s heart-wrenching recollections, Amabelle walks from Cap-Haïtien to the ruins of San Souci. As she reaches the ruins of the neoclassical palace, she is caught up in a group of visitors and hears the tour guide

The Revolt against Silence  221 interpreting the relevance of the location with a speech that effectively reveals and critiques the imperialist legacy of the Aeneid: “Henry Christophe was at first a foreigner here,” he [the tour guide] said. “He was born a slave in the Windward Islands and during his life made himself a king here . . . The king was sometimes cruel. He used to march battalions of soldiers off the mountain, ordering them to plunge to their deaths as a disciplinary example to the others. Thousands of our people died constructing what you see here. But this is not singular to him. All monuments of this great size are built with human blood.’ (279, emphasis added) Within the narrative of The Farming of Bones Christophe now offers a parallel (more than a contrast) to Trujillo. This presents an example of what Clitandre describes as Danticat’s habit of ‘destabilizing and denaturalizing mythic fantasy structures of the nation’ (2018, 140) that can lead to simplistic us-them, good-bad dichotomies. Whereas the person in the crowd had felt confident that the great revolutionary heroes would have responded forcefully to Trujillo’s pogrom, Amabelle realizes that such masculine militancy inevitably leads to suffering and trauma. Christophe’s ruins, which had inspired and comforted the young Amabelle (and the young Walcott), now reveal themselves to be monuments of empire, monuments of suffering. Virgil makes a similar point in the final lines of the Aeneid. The Trojan Aeneas, like Christophe – a foreigner fighting to control a new land – has defeated Turnus, the Italian leader fighting for his homeland. Turnus lies on the ground and begs for his life. Aeneas prepares to spare him, until he notices something on his enemy’s armor that drives him into a murderous rage (Aeneid 12.939–46 and 950–51): Aeneas volvens oculos dextramque repressit; et iam iamque magis cunctantem flectere sermo coeperat, infelix umero cum apparuit alto balteus et notis fulserunt cingula bullis Pallantis pueri, victum quem vulnere Turnus straverat atque umeris inimicum insigne gerebat. ille, oculis postquam saevi monimenta doloris exuviasque hausit . . . . . . ferrum adverso sub pectore condit fervidus.

940

945 950

Aeneas, eyes darting, restrained his sword-hand. He paused, and Turnus’ pleas began to sway him more and more, but then the cursed sword-belt over Turnus’ shoulder met his gaze and flashed with its familiar studs – the belt of young Pallas, whom Turnus threw to the ground, wounded and beaten, and now Turnus wore on his shoulders his enemy’s insignia. Aeneas, as soon as

222  The Revolt against Silence his eyes absorbed the blow of the trophy, that monument of cruel grief . . . , buries his sword deep in his foe’s chest, burning with rage. Virgil describes the sword belt of Pallas as monimenta, which in Latin denotes physical objects that preserve a memory and which is derived from the verb moneo, ‘to remind’ but also ‘to warn’ or ‘teach’. Pallas’ sword belt spurs Aeneas to remember his fallen comrade, and that recollection drives him to kill the now defenseless Turnus in an act that would (like Romulus’ murder of Remus) haunt Rome forever. The Sans Souci, which means ‘free of pain’ or ‘without suffering’, prompts Amabelle to remember her nation’s noble but also brutal history and to recognize the brutality and the human cost of any imperialistic venture. Amabelle realizes that Haiti’s saevi monimenta doloris (Virgil’s ‘monuments of cruel grief’) were ‘built with human blood’, and that Trujillo’s violence follows a long pattern of suffering that has maintained its momentum because of episodes such as the U.S occupation, Christophe’s cruel efforts to consolidate the Revolution, and, of course, the entire history of European colonization of the Caribbean that Christophe had fought to resist. This is a key moment in harmonizing Danticat’s literary form and narrative ethic as Amabelle’s experience resonates with that of Aeneas but to radically different ends. Both figures had fled from violent conflagrations in which they lost their beloved (Amabelle’s Sebastien and Aeneas’ Trojan wife Creusa). They both crossed a body of water to return to their ancestral homes. And near the end of their respective stories both gaze upon what Virgil calls the saevi monimenta doloris and which Danticat phrases as ‘monuments . . . built with human blood’. But here the narrative similarities end. Aeneas reacts to his experience by glutting his violent passion and, ‘burning with fury and dreadful with rage’ (furiis accensus et ira teribilis, 12.946–47), he kills Turnus, replicating Turnus’ slaying of Pallas and linking the foundations of empire to cycles of violence rather than to mercy. Remembering Lost Loves In contrast to Aeneas’ reaction to seeing these monumenta, Amabelle reflects on the distinction between those whose names are remembered and those who are forgotten. Through his physical monuments, Christophe achieved a kind of immortality, and this leads her to wonder about the nameless dead. The tour guide at Sans Souci prompts her with his final comment: ‘Men with names never truly die . . . It is only those nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air’ (280). She worries that Sebastien, along with so many other victims of Trujillo’s genocidal purge, will dissolve into nothingness, and the next, very short chapter, begins by framing their story as the sort that neither Haitian officials nor Trujillo himself would ever hear. In less than three pages, Amabelle repeats the opening line of the novel four times: ‘His name is Sebastien Onius’ (281–282). The present tense verb now hits differently than it had on the first page, and the repetitions become a kind of incantation. In one iteration of this incantation, Amabelle elaborates: ‘Death to Sebastien Onius was as immense as a treetossing beast of a raging hurricane. It was an event

The Revolt against Silence  223 that split open the sky and cracked the ground, made the heavens wail and the clouds weep. It was not for one person to live alone’ (282). Amabelle resists the silencing of history and insists that her Sebastien is not one of the nameless ghosts. She describes his death in a way that succinctly parallels Virgil’s description of Caesar’s death (Georgics 1.466–488, discussed above). In both cases, the heavens and earth react chaotically and portentously to human suffering. But whereas Virgil presents Caesar’s death as a political cataclysm, a unique tragedy that concerns everyone within the ambit of Roman power and a hinge of history that will reorder divine attitudes and the Italian landscape, Amabelle universalizes personal loss through Sebastien: ‘It [Death] was not for one person to live alone.’ Walcott frames poetic creativity in the ‘New World’ in just such terms. For authors who have ‘paid [their] accounts to Greece and Rome . . . the death of a gaucho does not merely repeat, but is, the death of Caesar’ (1998, 38). The Farming of Bones suggests precisely this link between Caesar and both Sebastien (for Amabelle) and Joël (for Kongo), but Walcott’s connection is too explicit and too balanced. Within Danticat’s novel, Caesar can fade away (much as Trujillo is never allowed to speak) so that the nameless victims of history can take center stage, leaving the likes of Caesar, Trujillo (the Caesar of the Caribbean) and Christophe to the peripheries.39 As Amabelle continues her incantation by repeating the novel’s opening line, Sebastien finally comes to her. Read as an anti-epic reflection of the Aeneid, this mystical encounter offers a counter reading to Aeneas’ relationship with Dido, the Queen of Carthage, which we describe before returning to Amabelle and Sebastien. In the Roman epic, Aeneas had arrived at the newly founded city of Carthage where it seemed he might find a permanent home. Through the intervention of the goddess Juno, he and Dido fall in love, and, while seeking refuge from a storm in a cave, they consummate what Dido understands to be a marriage (Aeneid 4.160– 172; vocat coniungum, ‘she calls it marriage’ 172). Since Aeneas’ fate is not to remain in Carthage but to continue to Italy (where his descendants will found Rome, which will rival and eventually destroy Carthage), he soon abandons Dido. The bereft and angry queen curses him for his treachery and kills herself as he sails away. Later in the epic, when the Trojan-Roman hero visits the Underworld, he encounters the specter of Dido. He speaks to her and attempts reconciliation, but she refuses to look at him and walks away without a word.40 Within the epic, the narrative arc involving Dido and Aeneas represents romance and intimacy in the service of imperial ambitions. Their love is both manufactured and sundered by divine forces (Juno and Venus), and their fractured relationship becomes the etiology for the historical triumph of Rome over Carthage. Within this story of Dido and Aeneas, two details from the queen’s dying curse resonate particularly with The Farming of Bones. First, she wishes that he may eventually die and lie ‘unburied, surrounded by sand’ (mediaque inhumatus harena, 4.620). Dido’s wish for Aeneas’ death is fulfilled in legends preserved outside the Aeneid that the hero would eventually die on the banks of the Numicus, a small river in Latium. While the story of Aeneas’ eventual death and deification at the river is only foreshadowed in the Aeneid, in Ovid’s version (both the most influential and the most relevant), Aeneas’ mother, Venus, asks the god of the river

224  The Revolt against Silence (also named Numicus) to cleanse away the mortal parts of her son so that Aeneas might become the locally revered god Indiges (Metamorphoses, 14.600–608):41 Hunc iubet Aeneae, quaecumque obnoxia morti, abluere et tacito deferre sub aequora cursu; corniger exsequitur Veneris mandata suisque, quidquid in Aenea fuerat mortale, repurgat et respergit aquis: pars optima restitit illi. Lustratum genetrix divino corpus odore unxit et ambrosia cum dulci nectare mixta contigit os fecitque deum, quem turba Quirini nuncupat Indigetem temploque arisque recepit. [Venus] orders [Numicus] to wash away from Aeneas every part of him that was liable to death and to bear it away under the surface of his silent stream. The horned one [i.e. Numicus] follows Venus’ instructions and with his waters cleansed away anything mortal in Aeneas and sprinkled him with water. The best part of him remained. His mother anointed his purified body with divine scents and touched his face and made him a god, whom the people of Quirinius [i.e., the Romans] call Indiges [The Indigenous God] and welcome at their temples and altars.42 Although in isolation Dido’s words about Aeneas dying media . . . harena, ‘surrounded by sand,’ could be understood in various ways (such as a shipwrecked sailor lying on a beach), the wider network of Roman myths recalls Aeneas experiencing a mystical death and apotheosis on the sandy banks of a river, where he transforms into a local, even ‘indigenous’, god Indiges.43 This new name, Indiges, suggests that Aeneas, paradoxically both the Trojan colonizer of Italy and the Italian ancestor returned, has become indigenous. This, in turn, resounds with the history of Haiti, which made the final push toward independence when Dessalines and Pétion made an alliance against Leclerc’s Napoleonic expedition and named their combined forces the Armée Indigène, the Indigenous Army.44 The second element of Dido’s curse that contributes to our reading of The Farming of Bones is her prayer that ‘an avenger might rise up from my bones’ (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor, 625) to punish Aeneas. Most superficially, this phrase suggests another intersection of bones and agriculture, since the verb exoriare can, but need not, be used to describe plant growth.45 David Quint has read this line as a counter-balance to the Aeneid’s optimistic presentation of Roman history and understands it as a ‘rival prophecy’ that ‘foretells the other side of the story’ (1993, 11). One fulfillment of that rival prophecy can be found early in Haitian literary history, when this same line is quoted in Latin by Juste Chanlatte, secretary to Dessalines and later to Christophe and one of Haiti’s first authors. He used Dido’s words as the epigraph to the second chapter of his Le cri de la nature (1810), the first work to offer an overview of the Haitian Revolution from a Haitian, anti-colonial perspective. As Chris Bongie has shown, the preceding chapter

The Revolt against Silence  225 of Chanlatte’s text had concluded with a direct address to European readers that could have been voiced by Dido herself: ‘If ever we have our painters, our poets, our sculptors and our historians, how dishonoring our monuments will be for you, if your crimes are faithfully recounted’ (quoted only in translation at Bongie 2015, 811).46 Chanlatte’s invocation of Dido’s curse positions Haiti, victorious in its confrontation with France, as the ‘avenger’ (ultor, Aen. 4.625) and heir of Dido, the African queen defeated by Aeneas and Rome. If Chanlatte uses Dido’s words as a heroic retort to European colonial powers that preserves epic’s martial tone, then Danticat’s anti-epic return to the intersection of bones and agriculture calls out not for vengeance but for healing from the traumas inflicted by imperialism and colonialism. Returning to The Farming of Bones, we can see that many details of Amabelle’s relationship with Sebastien invert the Aeneid’s portrayal of Dido and Aeneas. Most obviously, the Roman epic foregrounds Aeneas’ betrayal of Dido and a curse that shapes Roman history, whereas Amabelle and Sebastien remain true to each other despite their physical separation. Similarly, Virgil puts a masculine hero at the center of his narrative where Danticat focuses on a female protagonist. Beyond this, Amabelle and Sebastien make love for the first time in a grotto hidden behind the curtain of a waterfall that acts like a mystical prism to light the cave even during the night (100–101), much as Dido and Aeneas did the same in a cave brightened during the night by Juno’s lightening. These narrative threads come together as Amabelle repeats the novel’s opening line. The final time she calls to Sebastien, she adds that ‘his spirit must be in the waterfall cave’ (282). After this last invocation of his name, Sebastien comes to her. Whereas Aeneas and Dido encountered each other in the Underworld without resolving any of the issues that drove them apart, Sebastien brings healing remedies for Amabelle: ‘I have brought remedies for your wounds. I’ve brought citronella and cedarwood to keep the ants and mosquitoes from biting your skin, camphor, basil, and bitter oranges to reduce your fevers and keep your joints limber. I’ve brought ginger and celery, aniseed, and cinnamon for your digestion, turmeric for your teeth, and kowosòl [soursop] tea for your pleasant dreams’ (282). Much as Numicus purifies the body of Aeneas at the moment of his death in Ovid’s version, so Sebastien prepares Amabelle for the ambiguous end of their story. What is strikingly missing from Sebastien’s medical pharmacopeia is parsley, especially since Danticat emphasizes its near panacea-like status elsewhere in the novel.47 The absent-presence of the medicinal herb – an herb that is also a cypher for the Parsley Massacre – prompts a closer look at Sebastien as a healer-figure. Earlier in the novel Danticat tells us that Sebastien was named after ‘Saint Sebastien, who died not once, but twice’ (240). Saint Sebastien (usually spelled Sebastian in English) also was associated with healing and delivered those who prayed to him from plague. In Haiti, Saint Sebastien was linked to the lwa Gran Bwa, ‘a well-respected but enigmatic spirit of the forests who owns the leaves and knows their magical and medicinal secrets, for good and bad intentions’ (Dirksen 2018, 120). St. Sebastien was famously tied to a tree and shot through with arrows, but Gran Bwa is the tree that oversees healing

226  The Revolt against Silence herbs, such as parsley. In this context, then, Danticat completes her eulogy to Sebastien by inviting the reader to see him as a version of a healing spirit in the Haitian pantheon. Aeneas is apotheosized by the sacred herbs that his divine mother Venus and Numicus procure, but Sebastien becomes those herbs – becomes the font of healing itself. This brief chapter, in which Amabelle speaks again the openings lines of the novel four times and communicates with her beloved, dead Sebastien, concludes with her telling him that ‘I am coming to your waterfall’ (283). ‘Looking for the Dawn’ By the end of the novel, Amabelle has long been living among the ghosts left behind by the Parsley Massacre. ‘All my heirs will be like my ancestors: revenants, shadows, ghosts’ (278), she says. And we see that she, like Kongo before her, has no faith in the Virgilian vision of a natural world that guides the laborer to hidden truths about existence. Amabelle returns to the Dominican Republic and searches for her and Sebastien’s waterfall, but she cannot find it. Sensing that her quest may be more spiritual than physical, she turns finally to the river – the Dajabón, the Massacre River, the border that divides Hispaniola, the river that claimed the lives of her parents while she looked on helplessly as a child, where her beloved Sebastien had died, where she had seen so much suffering as she, too, nearly drowned in escaping Trujillo’s slaughter, the very river that still haunts the survivors’ memories with the ghosts of loved ones. This is the River of Trauma. The river that, in a Virgilian world, ought to speak wisdom and help us understand. Amabelle stands on the banks and remembers how her mother, fighting the river’s current, had looked back at her and how this small softening of her focus had caused her mother to slip and disappear beneath the waves of the rain-swollen current, an Orpheus looking back and swept away from a helpless Eurydice. Standing there, the old Amabelle is still haunted by the fact that as a young girl she could not make out the last words her mother had shouted to her as she sank into the river. In the final pages she meditates in a vein similar to that of Man Rapadou: ‘I . . . thought that if I came to the river on the right day, at the right hour, the surface of the water might provide the answer: a clearer sense of the moment, a stronger memory. But nature has no memory’ (309). Virgil’s Georgics boasts that nature reveals signs to the good farmer, but Danticat has burst the Virgilian bubble by revealing that nature is an unreliable narrator. Even the river now seems out of balance with her memories, since the raging torrent has shriveled to a mere trickle, far from the deluge that had claimed her parents and Sebastien. Yet she ends the novel much as Aeneas ends his mortal life: purified, at a river, and leaving readers guessing what, exactly, is happening. Having already been healed by the shade of Sebastien, she removes her dress and lies down on her back in the water, which does not even cover her shoulders. She describes herself as being ‘cradled in the current, paddling like a newborn in a washbasin’ (310). The novel concludes with the simple statement that Amabelle, naked like a baby just born and just washed, is ‘looking for the dawn’ (310). It may be that she dies, or perhaps she will soon stand up and return to Haiti.48 But she also

The Revolt against Silence  227 may experience something more mystical, as argued by Susana Vega-González, who emphasizes the role of Yoruba mythology to suggest that Amabelle becomes a water spirit, closely connected to Oshun – an attractive reading next to Aeneas’ apotheosis at a river (2004). Building on Vega-González, we suggest that Amabelle’s apotheosis to a water spirit would imply that Amabelle joins Sebastien at their secret, brightly lit waterfall, much as Antigòn leads Emon to their marriage bed that exists outside the human realm in Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn. On this latter hypothesis, Amabelle, an anti-epic Aeneas who calls out the abuses of heroic masculinity, may offer a redeeming twist on the final line of the Aeneid. When Aeneas sees the sword belt of Pallas, he flies into a rage and slaughters the defenseless Turnus, but the epic, perhaps surprisingly, devotes its final line and a half not to the ancestor of Roman power but to its victim: ‘but Turnus’ limbs relaxed in cold death, and with a groan his angry spirit fled to the shades below’ (ast illi solvuntur frigore membra/vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras, Aeneid, 12.951–52). Amabelle’s body, relaxed but not angry, lies in the river that is the source of all her trauma. If she, like Turnus, slips away to join the ghosts, then she does so less as a victim of the militant aspirations of Trujillo or Christophe or Aeneas, and more as a promise that trauma can be transformed into healing if we measure the costs of epic heroism in terms of human suffering rather than in terms of imperial domination. Bones Broken, Bones Set Danticat’s The Farming of Bones presents a network of anti-epic themes and images that invert material found in the Virgilian epics Georgics and Aeneid. On this level, the novel participates in revealing, countering and repairing the bonds that often tie epic poetry to coloniality and imperialism. But the novel also engages in a discourse about contagion and healing that speaks to the central strategy of Trujillo’s pogrom, namely that the medicinal herb parsley (pèsi in Creole and perejil in Spanish) could serve as the lynchpin for genocide. In short, contagion frames the historical context of the Parsley Massacre. On Octocber 2, 1937, Trujillo gave a speech in which he described the need for a ‘remedy’ against Haitians: ‘To the Dominicans who were complaining of the depredations by Haitians living among them . . . I have responded, “I will fix this.” And we have already begun to remedy the situation. Three hundred Haitians are now dead in Bánica. This remedy will continue’ (quoted at Turtis 2002, 613). Lauren Derby records a more explicit instance where Trujillo’s administration used the language of disease (quoted at 1994, 504): The Sanitation Official of Monte Cristi registered complaints about the high incidents of beggars in the northern Dominican border towns and the presence of ‘illegal’ Haitian immigrants walking the streets and endangering public health and welfare through their contamination with ‘contagious diseases.’ Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle, an influential intellectual in Trujillo’s orbit, mirrored Trujillo’s views regarding Haitians in similarly epidemiological terms: ‘the Haitian

228  The Revolt against Silence that enters [our country] lives afflicted by numerous and capital vices and is necessarily affected by diseases and physiological deficiencies which are endemic at the lowest levels of that society’ (quoted at Law and Tate 2015, 43). This widespread, state-sponsored discourse depicting Haitians as diseased makes the presence of parsley in the novel all the more poignant: parsley is a traditional Haitian therapeutic herb that Trujillo subverts in his effort to heal the Dominican nation from Haitian contagion via genocide. The positive associations with parsley are foregrounded early in the novel as Kongo is grieving for Joël. He stands in the middle of a river (not the Dajabón) and scrubs himself with a sprig of parsley. Amabelle offers wider context: ‘We used pèsi, perejil, parsley, the damp summer morningness of it, the mingled sprigs, bristly and coarse, gentle and docile all at once, tasteless and bitter when chewed, a sweetened wind inside the mouth, the leaves a different taste than the stalk, all this we savored for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides of old aches and griefs, to shed a passing year’s dust as a new one dawned, to wash a new infant’s hair for the first time and – along with boiled orange leaves – a corpse’s remains one final time’ (62). In this tender moment when the rumors of an impending massacre were barely audible in the community, Kongo uses parsley to soothe both his grief and his body, with its ‘map of scars’, an image that returns later in the novel when Amabelle describes her own body as ‘a map of scars . . . a marred testament’ (227). Once the slaughter along the border has begun to rage, Amabelle and Yves arrive to the town of Dajabón with a man named Tibon and an older couple named Odette and Wilner. To energize the purge, Trujillo comes to Dajabón to make a speech. Worked into a violent frenzy, some young men attack Amabelle’s group, disfiguring them and stuffing their mouths with parsley laced with pepper. In a perversion of parsley’s healing powers, Amabelle, who can pronounce perejil in impeccable Spanish but who is nonetheless marked as Haitian by the dark color of her skin, thinks to herself that ‘eating the parsley would keep me alive’ (193). Eating parsley, in this case, is not a medicinal therapy but a strategy for surviving murderous aggression. The violence intensifies as blood mixes with spat-out parsley, and just as it seems that the entire group will surely be killed, Trujillo’s motorcade drives by and the thugs prefer to run cheering after their leader. Tibon has been beaten to death, but the rest escape with their lives.49 Hours later, under cover of night, they cross the river. With Dominican soldiers shooting at them as they fight the river’s current, Wilner is hit and sinks below the water, but the others make it across. Amabelle drags with her the limp body of Odette, who lies dying in her arms. Odette’s last word is pèsi. Amabelle wonders why she chose this word, pronounced without any effort to say the mandated perejil. She thinks how utterly common parsley is and tries to connect it to Trujillo’s logic (repeating a line from Kongo’s bathing): We used parsley for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides. Perhaps the Gernalissimo in some larger order was

The Revolt against Silence  229 trying to do the same for his country. The Generalissimo’s mind was surely as dark as death, but if he had heard Odette’s “pèsi,” it might have startled him, not the tears and supplications he would have expected, no shriek from unbound fear, but a provocation, a challenge, a dare. (203) Amabelle supposes that Trujillo is attempting to use parsley to cleanse the Dominican Republic of Haitians, just as Haitians use the same herb to cleanse their bodies, but Odette’s defiantly Haitian pronunciation indicates that she has rejected Trujillo’s recourse to parsley as a symbol of necropolitical state health. Years later, Amabelle meets a traditional Haitian healer at the Palais Sans-Souci, who gives her an orange and instructs her (221): Warm this orange in an open fire . . . .When the skin turns all black, you know it’s ready. Then you cut it open while the juice is still hot, slap the insides against your flesh, then you take a warm bath and wash the orange flesh away. All your cuts will heal. Your bone aching will stop. Bones are the central image of the novel, and an image that connects Danticat and Virgil. Unlike so many victims of ‘the farming of bones’ in the cane fields of Hispaniola and unlike the nameless Roman soldiers whose bones are dug up by later Italian farmers, Amabelle is given relief from the traumatic aching of her bones. Amabelle’s bones are healed through Haitian medicine, a symbolic antidote to Trujillo’s sloganeering state-hygiene. Within the novel Trujillo is denied the opportunity to articulate his own message, but we do hear his propaganda parroted by another victim of his violence. Father Romain is a Haitian priest working in Alegría who helps Haitians escape the purge. Like Sebastien, he disappears from the narrative and re-appears only much later. In the meantime, he had been arrested and tortured. Like Man Rapadou’s description of her husband being turned by the ‘Yankis’ in similar circumstances, Father Romain emerges as a broken man, speaking what Martin Munro calls the ‘mechanical echoes’ (2006, 86) of Trujillo’s propaganda. In a counterpoint to a moment in the Aeneid when Virgil has his mythical characters predict that Trojan and Latin bloodlines will mix into a Roman people that ‘will surpass gods and men in virtue’, Father Romain, though Haitian, pitifully voices Trujillo’s racist manifesto: ‘Sometimes I cannot believe that this one island produced two such different peoples.50. . . .We, as Dominicans, must have our separate traditions and our own ways of living. If not, in less than three generations, we will all be Haitians. In three generations, our children and grandchildren will have their blood completely tainted unless we defend ourselves now, you understand?’ (261, emphasis added).51 Putting Amabelle’s comment about Trujillo’s cleansing of the state together with Father Romain’s propaganda about tainted blood, the novel presents the Parsley Massacre as a genocide framed in terms of Dominican national health and the Haitian people as a source of pestilential contagion.

230  The Revolt against Silence Conclusions: Danticat’s Therapoetics This state discourse of racial hygiene in Trujillo’s Dominican Republic and Danticat’s reframing of it by positioning Haitian healing as having the final say amounts to an inversion of what Julia Nelson Hawkins has elsewhere called ‘therapoetics.’52 Virgil, along with the other poets working under Augustus, began to frame Egypt – formerly the central hub for science, medicine, poetry, and the arts in the Mediterranean – as a locus of contagion. Egypt was often seen as source of contagion, both in the literal and metaphorical sense, largely due to poets like Virgil’s outsized influence. Egypt was often identified as the origin of plague outbreaks throughout antiquity, and this pattern persisted into later eras. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon sums up two millennia of racist stereotypes about Egypt (1890, 198):53 Aethiopia and Egypt have been stigmatized, in every age, as the original source and seminary of the plague. In a damp, hot, stagnating air, this African fever is generated from the putrefaction of animal substances, and especially from the swarms of locusts, not less destructive to mankind in their death than in their lives. But Egypt was also a cypher for contagion in the metaphorical sense of cultural contamination. The Pharaonic Ptolemies were depicted as being completely antithetical to austere Roman notions of Republicanism and mos maiorum (‘the way of the elders’) that were the slogans of the Civil Wars. The defeat of Cleopatra (and her Roman consort, Antony) at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE was framed in Augustan literature as a holy war to save what we might now describe as ‘Western Civilization’ and to preserve Italian health and purity from foreign contagion. Augustan poets, Nelson Hawkins argues (especially Virgil), attempt to position themselves as arbiters of state health that the emperor would be wise to employ. But Danticat turns Virgilian therapoetics on its head in the same way she does Latin intertextuality. Virgil’s therapoetic project never overtly condemns the dictator. It asserts that state-health cannot be complete without the medicinal and spiritual powers of the poet – at best, a ‘warning’ to the prince against unilateral power and hubris. It is this traditional model of therapoetics that Trujillo tried to employ. Médar de la Cruz Serrata shows how the epic genre was a central feature in solidifying Trujillo’s dictatorship, by creating a state narrative that positions Hispaniola as the Dominican birthright, similar to the way Rome is figured as the destined birthright of Aeneas and his descendants in the Aeneid. As de la Cruz Serrata shows, the Dominican poet Héctor Incháustegui Cabral, in his epic En el mapa, la Patria redimida (1957), celebrates Trujillo’s rise to power and depicts Hispaniola as birthed from the bottom of the sea by God himself for the Dominicans. The island is made of the same matter from which humans and angels were created, and Incháustegui Cabral describes it as a paradise similar to the way Virgil depicts Arcadia. In the section titled ‘Mediodía 1844–1865’ Incháustegui Cabral ‘marks a drastic shift in the tone of the poem, which becomes heroic and celebratory as the wars of

The Revolt against Silence  231 independence signal the triumph of light over darkness,’ and these lines culminate with a direct allusion to Virgil.54 De la Cruz Serrata traces Incháustegui Cabral’s ‘How difficult it is to build nations’ (Qué difícil es hacer naciones!, 105) to Virgil’s ‘Such a great difficulty it was to found the Roman people!’ (Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem, Aen. 1.33). De la Cruz Serrata goes on to show how other Dominican poets relied on Virgil as a model for Trujillista propaganda, using Augustus’ conquest of Egypt and consolidation of Italy as a map for how to turn ‘the Haitian Massacre into a war for survival between the forces of civilization and a foreign Other, identified with Africa, nature, irrationality and chaos.’55 The Augustan regime was obsessed with the Egyptian landscape as a source of wild contagion, and Trujillo had much the same attitude toward the Haitian people as pestilential African bodies. As we have seen in two pivotal passages Danticat emphasizes that parsley is, for Haitians, a healing plant that cures ills and thereby highlights the perversity of its use by Trujillo as an image of state healing through ethnic cleansing. Danticat’s reworking of Virgil’s African contagion (as well as her use of ‘echoes,’ which broadly contrasts with the habits of Latin intertextual studies) serves to resist and decenter the literary codes of Western imperial domination. Clitandre describes this process in terms of an anti-imperial and anti-colonial critique by the ‘Third World Black woman’ (2001, 30–31). In a political climate dominated by a former American president who has openly called Haiti a ‘shithole’ and described immigrants as vectors of disease, Danticat’s dismantling of the colonial narrative of xenophobic, Western ‘health’ through a new narrative of antiracist and anti-colonial healing marks the novel as a new type of epic structured around a logic that counteracts the toxic monumentality of Virgil’s Aeneid and the Palais Sans-Souci itself.56 Notes 1 This essay is an updated version of her 2008 Toni Morrison lecture by the same name. For wider assessments of this essay and collection, we rely most heavily on Clitandre 2018, 55–77 and Bandau 2021. 2 Numa, Drouin and the Jeune Haiti insurgency appeared briefly in Chapters 7 and 8. 3 Camus delivered a speech by this name in 1957 shortly after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. The most recent English edition is Camus, A., 2019, Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist, S. Smith, trans., New York: Vintage Books. 4 Clitandre also brings Antigone into her interpretation of Brother, I’m Dying (169), which suggests that Antigone is important to Danticat’s project as a writer more broadly even though she has not (at least in her published works) discussed Antigone in great detail. 5 This denial of Antigone urges readers to interpret the scenario through the lens of Antigone, much like Walcott’s request in Omeros that his readers see his Helen ‘with no Homeric shadow’. 6 Intertextuality has been the dominant interpretive lens in the study of Latin Poetry for around 40 years. Sciarrino (2015, 373) provides an excellent assessment of intertextuality’s historical relevance: ‘Born as a reaction to the monopoly of New Criticism in the Anglo-(North)American world and as a redress to the crisis of traditional historicism in Italy, intertextuality assigned primacy to the reader as meaning-making agent and, by calling into question the unity of a text, located meaning in the relationship of a text with prior texts and in the generic codes that these texts used.’ In reading Danticat together

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with Virgil, we are particularly inspired by Patricia Rosenmeyer’s (1997, 121) important assessment that ‘. . . female and male authors cannot engage in intertextual dialogue without gender influencing their gestures and our interpretations.’ For an example of how intertextuality is used in postcolonial contexts, see Trivedi 2007 and Batchelor 2013. Cowart 2006 takes a different approach in arguing that ‘Danticat .  .  . represents the immigrant as a Persephone never fully reconciled to life in the underworld’ (127) in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). Cowart’s suggestion puts Danticat in the position of actively responding to the myth of Persephone in her novel. Were she to deny that she had been thinking of Persephone, then Cowart’s statement would be proven false. For Virgil’s bees, see Ecl. 1.53–58 and Geo. 4.219–227. The reception of epic, especially Virgilian epic, has frequently aligned with oppressive political and cultural regimes, from European colonization of the Americas to the snippets of Virgil’s poetry on the U.S. dollar bill (annuit coeptis derives from Aeneid 9.625 and novus ordo seclorum is a hacking of Eclogue 4.5–8) to 20th century Italian Fascism and German Nazism. For such issues, see Kallendorf 2007, Quint 1993, and Thomas 2001. The foundation for this Christianizing move can be traced back to Eusebius’ account of Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, reading Virgil’s Eclogues and Aeneid through the lens of Christianity, even arguing that Virgil was a prophet of Christ, for which, see Bourne 1916. For the relationship between Virgil and Fracastoro, see Murgatroyd 2006 and Piechocki 2016. Paulino 2016, the most updated and thorough analysis of the massacre within the wider history of Haitian-Dominican relations, places the number of dead at 15,000. Trujillo’s control of the narrative within the state-controlled Dominican press of this era makes it difficult to determine the number with precision. See also Milian Arias 2004, 139, who applies Anzaldúa’s idea of ‘linguistic terrorism’ to The Farming of Bones. The Dajabón River is also known as the Massacre River because of a 1728 massacre of French pirates by Spanish settlers. Both structures are described and discussed in more detail in the Introduction. Artists who have engaged with the Parsley Massacre: René Philoctète’s novel Le peuple de Terres Mêlées (1989, translated into English as Massacre River, 2005, New Directions Books), Jacques Stephen Alexis’ novel Compère General Soleil (1955, translated into English as General Sun, My Brother, 1999), Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies (1994), and Ernst Prophète’s painting ‘1937: Grand’ Mère me disait que la riv. massacre était en sang.’ The perspective of resident foreigners is captured in Dartigue and Dartigue 2013. For the ‘fuzzy connections,’ see Hardwick 2011. The tenor of Virgil’s Aeneid has long been a matter of debate, but Giusti 2018, 11 offers a useful and succinct statement of the semantic flexibility built into the poem’s engagement with its political context: ‘The ideology of a regime that presented itself as a paradoxical “monarchic Republic” was shaped in such a way as to accommodate patent oppositions and contradictions while encompassing the totality of Rome’s post-crisis political discourse.’ The cane fields play a similarly important role in Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), where they serve as the locus for trauma, especially sexual trauma. denique, quid Vesper serus uehat, unde serenas uentus agat nubes, quid cogitet umidus Auster, sol tibi signa dabit. solem quis dicere falsum audeat? ille etiam caecos instare tumultus saepe monet fraudemque et operta tumescere bella. Aristotle preserves the fullest account of this legend, in which the Phrygian king Midas captured Silenus, a satyr-like god associated with Dionysus, and demanded that he share

The Revolt against Silence  233

23 24 25

26 27

28 29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37

his wisdom. After much resistance, Silenus gives Midas the insight that it is better for humans not to have existed at all. This passage from Aristotle’s Eudemus (fr. 44 Rose) is preserved by Plutarch (Consolatio ad Apollonium, 27). optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis. W. E. B. du Bois expresses a similar sentiment in reflecting on the death of his infant son: ‘He knew no color-line, poor dear – and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun’ (2007, 1903, 101). Such ominous fractures in nature are grounds for a ‘pessimistic’ reading of Virgil’s Georgics, whereby the farmer’s labor is not redemptive but emblematic of humanity’s prostrate position vis-à-vis the gods. For an overview of the debate between ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ readings, see Clark 2017 and Gaskin 2021. For which, see Paulino 2016. One of the most important aspects of Peralta’s chapter is the discussion of the Dominican rhetoric leading up to the Parsley Massacre, often couched in terms of Spartan martial virtue, that has persisted into the current era. Spartan imagery can be both a goal and boogieman, and Peralta quotes Jorge Mora’s comments from 2004 warning Dominicans to be vigilant lest they become Helots to Haitian Sparta (115–116). (Helots were the people of Laconia and Messenia who were subjugated and dominated by Sparta.) On the idea that arma virumque worked as a title, see (most recently) Mac Góráin 2018. Octavian, Julius Caesar’s heir, took Augustus as an honorific title, thus becoming the Emperor Augustus. Later emperors absorbed this name into their titulature. Greek authors regularly referred to the emperor as Kaisaros Sebastos, the equivalent of ‘Caesar Augustus’. Greek ônios (with an initial omega or long-o) means ‘something bought and sold’ and with an omicron (or short-o) onius means ‘something useful’. Latin onus means ‘a burden’. Taken together, the name Sebastien Onius can be rendered as an ‘august commodity’ or ‘imperial burden’ or an ‘honored beneficence’. Later in the novel Amabelle learns from Sebastien’s mother that he had been named for Saint Sebastien, in hopes that he, like the saint in one strand of his mythology, might have two lives (240). For the importance of the theme of silence among female Caribbean writers generally, see Davies and Fido 1990, 1. Both Greenwood 2020 and Forbes 2011 deal with the role of silence (and, for Greenwood, bones) in the writings of Philip. Broader intersectional discussions of silence can be found in d’Almeida 1994. For a thorough reassessment of Trouillot’s influential claim, see Sepinwall 2013 and Carby 2015. Daut 2017, 126–127 offers a closely related line of thinking. For a carefully theorized discussion of trauma and disability in The Farming of Bones, see Hewett 2006. Peralta 2020 traces the comparison between Trujillo and Caesar back to an editorial article in the Dominican newspaper La Revista in 1927 (three years before Trujillo took power). The collocation returns, typically as an evocative title rather than through deep analysis, in Beals 1938, Ornes 1958 and Espaillat 1965. Peralta’s chapter focuses on the idea of the Dominican Republic as the Athens or (more typical in Trujillo’s era) the Sparta of the Caribbean. James 1963, 408–409, makes a similar point, especially by closely linking Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’ in this case) with Trujillo and linking the stability of both regimes to support from the U.S. Christophe’s name is regularly preserved with the French spelling Henri but he used the English version when he became King Henry. He plays a similar role in Carpentier 2006, in which Christophe’s reign is presented as little different from the system of colonial enslavement. We are grateful to the anonymous reader report that suggests a connection (diffuse rather than explicit) between Man Rapadou’s choice to murder her husband to protect the resistance movement and Herodotus’ story about the unnamed wife of Intaphrenes, which

234  The Revolt against Silence

38 39

40

41 42

43 44 45

46

47

48

49

resonates with that of Antigone. Intaphrenes had helped Darius I  take the throne of Achaemenid Persia but gave signs that he was plotting against the new king. Darius imprisoned all male members of his family, and Intaphrenes’ wife stationed herself at the king’s gates to mourn her family’s fate. Moved by her devotion, Darius granted her the opportunity to save one member of her family, and instead of selecting her husband or one of their sons, she chose to save her brother, on the grounds that while she could find another husband and have more children, she would never be able to replace her brother. παντοπόρος. ἄπορος ἐπ᾽ οὐδὲν ἔρχεται / τὸ μέλλον. Ἅιδα μόνον φεῦξιν οὐκ ἐπάξεται / νόσων δ᾽ ἀμηχάνων φυγὰς ξυμπέφρασται. As pointed out to us by Justine McConnell, this effect parallels that of Junot Diaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which regularly relegates Trujillo to long and colorful footnotes, rather than giving him space in the main body of the novel; it also parallels Laferrière’s vision of subverting the centrality of the dictator by pursuing happiness in the face of political domination (Chapter 8). This is the second time in the poem that Aeneas encounters a former love. In recounting his escape from Troy, Aeneas describes how he had become separated from his wife, Creusa, and that she appeared to him as a ghost in order to urge him not to look for her but to flee with their son. The ancient commentator Servius claims that the reference to the Numicus at Aen 7.150 foreshadows the death and apotheosis of Aeneas (Serv. Aen. 7.797). Greenwood 2020, 35–37, cites Augustine’s comment that in his era (4th c. C.E.) the distinction had been lost between ōs, ‘mouth’ or ‘face’, and os, ‘bone’. Although Virgil’s text is much earlier and the meter insists that the word is ōs, we might imagine a subversive reading of line 607 as ‘she touched his bone’ (contigit os). Livy, the Roman historian who died in 17 CE, claims that Aeneas becomes a manifestation of Jupiter, Jupiter Indiges (Ab Urbe Condita, 1.2). For the Haitian rhetoric of indigeneity, see Perry 2017. Even without pressing the translation of exoriare in this way, Dido’s curse, like Kongo’s description of cane-cutting as ‘the farming of bones’, combines human suffering and bones. Virgil also alludes to Rome’s decimation of Carthage that legendarily involved sowing salt into its fields so that nothing might ever grow there again. Bongie also shows that not only was Chanlatte one of several of the under-signers of Dessalines’ ‘I have Avenged America’ speech from April 28, 1804, but that that famous image of the avenger may have been Chanlatte’s idea, since he had been using such language as early as 1791 (809). Parsley was primarily used in the Mediterranean, where it is native, as a medical herb. This tradition continued after the Columbian Exchange in most of the countries around the world whose climates supported its growth, including Haiti, though by this time, cuisine and materia medica were often two sides of the same coin. In Roman medical texts, parsley is frequently included with several of the herbs Sebastien mentions, such as celery and cinnamon. Clitandre 2001, 46 suggests suicide. Shemak 2002 focuses on Amabelle’s location at the border but reads the final scene less in terms of healing and more in terms of a linkage between the horrors of 1937 and the ongoing struggles along the Haitian-Dominican border. Hewett 2006 finds that Amabelle ‘gives birth to herself’ (142) in the presence of Papa Legba, and that this signifies a new wholeness rooted in an acceptance of her trauma. Martin 2007 understands this final moment as the culmination of Amabelle fully remembering and embracing her Haitian identity. Hewett, working from the perspectives of trauma and disabilities studies, links Tibon, who is crippled, with the man called ‘professor’ in the novel’s closing scene (137–142). She argues that both are manifestations of the similarly disabled Papa Legba, the Vodou lwa who mediates between the living and the spirits. Viewed from this perspective, Tibon dies guarding Amabelle but will re-appear in another form when needed again.

The Revolt against Silence  235 50 Very early in the novel Amabelle helps her Dominican mistress give birth to twins, one a darker skinned girl the other a lighter skinned boy, who soon dies. Shemak 2002, 92, comments on this scene in terms of Hispaniola being ‘configured as a kind of womb that “gives birth” to two nations.’ In this sense, the racialization of the twins also reiterates Bergeaud’s racialization of Romulus and Remus as the darker and lighter skinned populations within Haiti, as discussed in Chapter 2. 51 Romain appears a final time having recovered only after leaving the Catholic priesthood and starting a Haitian family, a change that Martin 2007 interprets as ‘a repositioning of the Haitian over the Western’ (249) in a way that allows him to fully remember his Haitian identity and, thereby, heal. 52 Nelson Hawkins (in preparation). 53 Gibbon, E., 1890, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. III, Exeter: W. W. Gibbings. 54 de la Cruz Serrata, M., 2009, Epic and Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic: The Struggles of Trujillo’s Intellectuals, Dissertation: University of Texas at Austin, 18. 55 Ibid., 163. 56 This understanding of a monument brings it close to Lorde’s comment about the master’s monumental house. Barnard (2018) leans into the power of monuments in his analysis of public works of art that foster the memory of the dominant narrative while simultaneously reading-out contrasting narratives, such as the role of enslaved people in building monuments – whether in Pharaonic Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, or the early U.S. Particularly relevant is Barnard’s analysis of ‘the countermonumental point of view’ (184) of Kara Walker’s 2014 monumental installation work ‘A Subtlety: or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant’ (178–186). Walker’s Fons Americanus (2019) warrants a similar analysis but was created after Barnard’s publication.

Coda

I do not want to write a conclusion. I am opening the discussion.

– Morisseau-Leroy (1983)

As European monarchies built their colonial infrastructures that eventually stretched across the globe, they brought with them attitudes and ideals shaped in large part by their zeal for Greco-Roman antiquity. This made it easy and obvious for authors such as Italian historian Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (1457–1526) to describe Columbus’ arrival to Quisqueya, which Spain would claim as Hispaniola, in terms of the Virgilian episode recounting Aeneas’ arrival to Italy. With the European hero framed in terms of canonical epic, it was another easy and obvious move to portray resistance to colonial expansion in terms of the monsters faced by the likes of Aeneas and Odysseus. As Philip Hardie has shown, peoples newly encountered by invading Europeans came to be so closely associated with these negative stereotypes that ‘Homer’s man-eating [Cyclops] Polyphemus provided an obvious analogy for the [rumors of] West Indian cannibalism that so obsessed the European mind in its early encounters with the New World’ (2014, 152). The legacy of ancient Greece and Rome was brought to the Americas in order to naturalize and legitimize the imperial project, to civilize savagery and, when necessary, to justify any amount of violence necessary to ensure success as determined by European (white, Christian) standards. In the face of this deep structural alignment between ‘the classics’ and coloniality, one can easily understand Audre Lorde’s warning about ‘the master’s tools’ that will fail to change the monumental system represented by the ‘master’s house’. Her cautionary wisdom rings particularly true in terms of the colonial reception of Greco-Roman antiquity and the ways that artists, teachers, and students absorb, understand and (re-)present this material. Such receptions, however, not only encompass the colonial and monumental approaches to ‘classical’ antiquity, but also the anti-colonial and, in Barnard’s terms, the ‘countermonumental’ (2018, 184). The Haitian writers studied in the preceding chapters have all hacked the ideology that made the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome a tool of colonial oppression and reforged it in the service of decoloniality. Indeed, each set of three chapters

Coda  237 reveals a roughly cohesive strategy for engaging ancient Mediterranean cultures as a means of countering Eurocentrism (though of course closer scrutiny reveals plenty of variation as well). While the earliest efforts may feel outdated today, in their accepting valorization of classical antiquity, this represents an important first step in a process, the revolutionary moment of taking the tool away from the master but without the opportunity to yet remake it in creative ways. Boyer, Bergeaud and Firmin all re-present the importance of the Haitian Revolution to audiences that were primarily European, and they all use the colonial rhetoric about the ancient Mediterranean to frame the Haitian national project. By likening the victory of 1804 to the Greek victory over Persia in the 5th century BCE, Boyer positions Haiti as the truest contemporary heir to that legacy and aligns France with the imperial Ottomans and ancient Persians as enemies of freedom and liberty. Bergeaud’s novel was posthumously published in Paris, where one of the treasures of the Louvre (a gift to Louis XVIII from Pope Pius VII) was the ancient Roman statues of the river god Tibur sheltering the infants Romulus and Remus. Bergeaud’s surprising move to have the Haitian Romulus not kill Remus promised a future for his young nation in which fratricidal guilt has been replaced by a post-racial brotherhood of citizens. And Firmin compares Haiti most directly to ancient and black Egypt, which he argues is the ultimate source for the greatness of ancient Greece. In roughly the first half of the twentieth century, Hibbert, Price-Mars and Morisseau-Leroy took a markedly different approach to both Haitian culture and its relationship to ancient Greece and Rome. Whereas nineteenth-century authors had idealized both the Haitian Revolution and the ‘classical’ past, these authors brought both down from their pedestals – a critical transitional step in hacking the coloniality of the classics. Hibbert used a re-booted version of the Roman and, through Bergeaud, Haitian figure of Romulus for his satirical analysis of revolutionary ardor and to raise warnings about the rise of U.S. power. Price-Mars, working under the U.S. occupation, championed the Haitian peasantry in part by turning to ancient Greece and Rome not for their exceptional achievements but for their very typical subsistence realities. And Morisseau-Leroy began the process of making Sophocles Haitian by reformulating the myth of Antigone as a Creole and Vodou narrative in which the power to resist exists not with a man in a position of authority but with a stubborn girl who demands that her dead brother be treated with dignity. With the rise of Duvalierism Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn became a recurring and pliable figure of resistance, and her role in the later chapters of this book attest to both the flexibility of hacking and the emergent idea of echoing, that Julia Nelson Hawkins and I  expand from Clitandre’s reading of Danticat’s oeuvre. Antigone resonates in 1959 with Duvalier’s desecration of the corpse of Clément Jumelle (and in Morisseau-Leroy’s 1972 poem reflecting on Jumelle’s funeral), in 1964 at the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin (and in Danticat’s essay about them from 2010), in 1976 with the slaying of Gasner Raymond (the motivating event in Laferrière’s Le cri des oiseaux fous, 2000), and in MorisseauLeroy’s 1978 Wa Kreyon, which denounces Duvalierist violence while also revealing its continuity in the transition from Papa Doc to Baby Doc Duvalier. In

238  Coda parallel to Antigone’s echo chamber, Laferrière also follows Morisseau-Leroy’s lead in combining Greek and Haitian mythologies, as the Homeric hero Ulysses and the Vodou lwa Legba combine to help Old Bones (Laferrière’s narrative double) escape the reach of Baby Doc’s Tonton Macoute. And the volume concludes with what may be the most profound example of hacking classical forms, specifically because it completely eschews the allusions that most often provide the irrefutable proof of engagement. Danticat retells a story from before her birth, in which the 1937 Parsley Massacre and the excesses of Henri Christophe (and implicitly those of the Duvaliers as well) echo themes and images found in the imperialist poetry par excellence of Virgil. Given all that these authors have accomplished in reframing Greco-Roman antiquity as a discursive space for anti-colonial thinking, which is, to be sure, only one element of their collective literary achievement, one might wonder how significantly their efforts altered the structures of coloniality. Following the Kuhnian model of scientific revolutions whereby paradigms are destined to be overturned through new knowledge and systems, one might expect that the racist paradigm of the early colonizers, whereby native inhabitants were thought to be cannibals and savages, would have been overturned at the time of (or soon after) the Haitian Revolution. The fact that it was not is yet another manifestation of Michel-Rolf Trouillot’s description of the Haitian Revolution as an ‘unthinkable’ event (1995, 70–107). The damage wrought upon Haiti by the strictures of coloniality, most egregiously imposed by France and the U.S., is one of the starkest examples of systemic racism on the planet. How could one of the most successful uprisings in recorded history not have overturned the structures that aligned white coloniality with ancient Greece and Rome? As a scholar of literature, I would love to think, with Laferrière’s Ézéquiel (Chapter  8), that the arts must, somehow, be the key. And to some extent, they certainly are. But the progressive transformation of cultural paradigms must be correlated to progressive structural development as well, and in so many ways the history of Haitian culture has been shackled by the legacy of the fiscal neocolonialism of France (especially in the indemnity of 1825) and the U.S. (especially in the occupation of 1915–1934). Here, again, Ali Mazrui’s description of the intertwined acts of ‘piracy’ – Europe’s cultural theft of ancient Greece, followed by the annexation of territory – gets to the heart of the matter. Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s model of hacking as a way to reappropriate stolen legacies, which I have used as an overarching methodological metaphor for this book, and Danticat’s poetics of echoing (Chapter 9), which slips the knot of allusivity to respond to modern exigencies of displacement, patriarchy and oppression, open the possibility of transforming these discrete readings of Haitian literature from the past into paradigms for progress in the future, but only if they can be paired with broader developmental uplift. Days before I submitted a complete draft of this manuscript to my editors, The New York Times began publishing a series of articles about Haiti clustered under the label the ‘Ransom Project’. In a move that contrasts with so many patronizing depictions of Haiti in the media, the ‘Ransom Project’ reveals the ways in which Haiti was held hostage after its Revolution. Perhaps the

Coda  239 extensive reach of this prominent newspaper, publishing from the heart of the financial universe, can facilitate a change toward acknowledging the point made by Marlene Daut (cited above in Chapter 1) that ‘Haiti should be at the center of the global movement for reparations’ (2020a, b). This is not just a matter of critical concern for Haiti but, I suggest, for the planet. At a moment when trends toward authoritarianism and ultra-nationalism are on the rise across the world, the example of Haiti (together with other examples of anticolonial movements) needs to be more broadly known, studied, and understood, so that we can shift systemic oppression toward the aspiration of what Joseph describes as ‘systemic allyship.’ To counter-balance Mazrui’s two-part description of piracy, the world needs to confront and render ‘thinkable’ (mirroring Trouillot’s terms) both the Haitian territorial victory of 1804 and the long history of Haitian anti-colonial culture from Dessalines’ Declaration of Independence, which reframed the colonizers as the true barbarians, to the contemporary works of artists like Laferrière and Danticat, who continue to lead a ‘revolt against silence’ as a way of exposing and hacking the algorithms of oppression. One way to amplify such work is to recognize that, like these authors, we each have a choice about how to read and respond to the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome. The method outlined here, that of hacking the colonial logic of the classical curriculum, represents one such choice, which brings with it consequential forms of cultural and political agency. As with Morisseau-Leroy’s epigraph above, however, this conclusion should not be understood as an ending but as a renewed opening of this ongoing conversation.

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Index

Achilles 52, 86–94, 111–114, 215 Actaeon 52, 62 Adams, J. 16 Aeneas 52, 67–68, 198, 209–210, 220–227, 237 Aeschylus 39–40, 82–84, 89, 168 Aesop 128–129 Agoué 196–199 Alexis, J.-J. S. 11 Alexis, P. N. 106, 123 Anouilh, J. 137–139, 149–151 Antigone/Antigòn 20–21, 29, 65, 103–105, 130, 237–238; in Danticat 204–208, 210, 219; in Laferrière 180–193, 198–199; Morisseau-Leroy’s 1953 play Ch. 6 (passim);135–152; Morisseau-Leroy’s 1972 poem 163–166; Morisseau-Leroy’s Wa Kreyon 166–177 Ariadne 89–93 Aristotle 26, 49, 84, 126, 183, 186 Athena 51, 64–66, 91–92 Athens 4, 13–15, 38, 94, 108, 114, 130–131, 168 Augustus (a.k.a., Octavian) 108, 114, 213, 215, 216, 230–231 Ayida Wèdo (Ayida Weddo) 150 Bacchus (aka Dionysus) 89–93, 126, 143–144 barbarian (barbaros) 25–28, 39–41, 84, 239 Barbot, C. 169 Baron de Vastey, P. V. 8–9 Basquiat, J.-M. 10–11, 181 Bazelais, J.-P. 106–113, 117, 205 Bergeaud, É. Ch. 2 (passim); 19, 47–69, 78, 87–88, 99–103, 105–107, 113–115, 123–124, 149, 186, 208, 237 Bernal, M. 79

Blumenbach, J. F. 92–93 Bois Caïman 12, 16, 59, 63–64, 100–101, 117, 125, 142, 150 Bondye 143, 145–146 Boukman, D. 117 Boyer, J.-P. Ch. 1 (passim); 17–19, 25–42, 47–48, 94, 99–101, 106–115, 205, 237 Brathwaite, K. 166 Broca, P. 79–84, 101 Camus, A. 6, 175–176, 205–207 Capoix, F. (aka, Capois, ‘the Negro Achilles’) 86–88, 94, 102, 111 Carthage 9, 27, 51, 85, 223 Césaire, A. 41, 102, 131, 182, 197–199 Champolion, J. F. 80 Chanlatte, J. 224–225 Charles X 17, 35, 43, 112 Chavannes, J.-B. 58–59 Christophe, H. (a.k.a. Henry I) 3, 7–9, 30–31, 48, 60–61, 100, 107, 208, 218–227, 238 Cicero 25, 51, 108 Circe 51, 118, 194–195 Citadelle Laferrière 7–8, 30, 211, 218–219 Cleopatra 10, 126, 213, 230 colonialism (and related concepts) 2–21, 25–31, 34–43, 50–60, 62–69, 78–79, 101–103, 113–115, 128–131, 135–137, 160–161, 175–177, 197–198, 208–212, 214–216, 224–227, 231, 236–239 Columbus, C. 5, 14–15, 210, 236 Cooper, A. J. 12, 94, 102 Creole 19–21, 29–31, 65, 102–105, 114–118, 124–125, 128–130, 135–138, 142, 151–152, 157–158, 163, 184–185, 187–188

Index  261 Damballa (Danmbala) 149–150 Danticat, E. Ch. 9 (passim); 1–6, 20–21, 159–160, 204–231, 237–239 Déjoie, L. 158 desounen ritual 173 Dessalines, J.-J. 3, 8–11, 25–36, 60–62, 109–115, 136, 141, 217–218, 239 D-Fi Powèt Revòlte and Ken-Fs 10 Dido 209, 223–225 Dionysus see Bacchus Diop, C. A. 79 Dominican Republic (a.k.a., Santo Domingo) 31, 37, 47, 123, 130–132, 211–215, 217–219, 226–231 Drouin, L. 160, 205–206, 237 du Bois, W. E. B. 94, 102 Duvalier, F. (a.k.a., Papa Doc) Ch. 7–8 (passim); 11, 19–20, 103–104, 147, 157–160, 162–199, 204–208, 237 Duvalier, J.-C. (a.k.a., Baby Doc) Ch. 8 (passim); 20, 157, 169–177, 180–199, 237–238 Duvalier, Marie-Denise 169 Duvalierism 13, 20, 101, 138, 162–199, 204, 217, 220, 237 Egypt and Egyptology Ch. 2 (passim); 19, 47–69, 68, 101, 124–125, 143, 230–231 Epaphus 81–83 Epictetus 87 Ethiopia 9, 101–102, 230 Euripides 108, 126, 137, 168, 206, 212 European Enlightenment 12–13, 26, 43, 52–58, 62–69 Èzili Freda 145, 149–150 Fanon, F. 2, 27, 57, 131 Fatiman, C. 117 Faubert, I. 24n43, 148 Fignolé, D. 158 Filemon, I. 36, 100 Firmin, A. Ch. 3 (passim); 19–20, 78–94, 99–104, 105–106, 123–124, 237 Fouché, F. 104, 137, 151, 206 Fracastoro, G. 210 Frankétienne 104, 138, 147–148, 199, 219 French Revolution 10, 28, 59, 69, 94, 128 Fugard, A. 139, 163, 166, 169 fuzzy connections 51–52, 211 genocide 4, 16–17, 21, 26–27, 62, 131, 208, 211–212, 222, 227–229 Ghana 20, 162–170, 177

Gobineau, Comte de 78–81, 84, 93–94 Gran Bwa 225 Grann Brijit 146 hacking 2–12, 50–54, 100–104, 113–115, 198–199, 208–216, 237–239 Haiti: 1805 Constitution 29, 107; Declaration of Independence 12, 16, 25–28, 39–40, 100, 136, 239; Diaspora 103–104, 157–165, 170–177, 181, 194, 198, 207; occupation of Santo Domingo 31, 215; Republic of 30, 48, 218; Revolution (1791–1804) 2–8, 12–21, 26–30, 36–41, 47–48, 52–63, 85–94, 100–104, 109–113, 142, 216–218, 222–224, 237–238; Saint-Domingue 1–7, 13–19, 25–26, 28, 30, 35, 39, 43, 48, 52–63, 86, 92, 94, 102, 136–137, 147, 172, 216–218; Spanish Haiti 31; State of Haiti 30, 48; State of the South 48; see also U.S. occupation of Haiti Helen 3, 52, 65 Herodotus 26, 49, 80–81, 91, 99 Hibbert, F. Ch. 4 (passim); 19, 105–118, 142, 151, 208, 237 Hippolyte, D. 85 Homer/Homeric poetry 3, 49–52, 81–92, 111–112, 117–118, 143–147, 193–199, 202–216, 236–238 Horace 25–26, 51–53, 69, 85, 181, 215 India 42, 89–93 Io 82–83 James, C. L. R. 125, 131 Jeannot et Thérèse 136–137 Jefferson, T. 15–16 Jeune Haiti insurrection 170, 190, 205 Joseph, M. B. 2, 238 Julius Caesar 9, 11, 51, 68, 86–87, 176, 213 Jumelle, C. 20, 158–164, 183, 186, 237 Jupiter (a.k.a., Zeus) 29, 52, 64, 82, 91–92 Korais, A. 35–39 Laferrière, D. Ch. 8 (passim); 20–21, 159–160, 180–199, 238–239 Laferrière, D. K. (père) 20, 183, 186, 192, 196–199 La Fontaine 128–129, 138

262 Index Laveaux, É. 26, 60 Leclerc, C. 17, 48, 61–62, 86 Legba 21, 126, 142–149, 180, 193–199, 238 Leonidas 37–38, 58, 102 Lessing, G. 68, 177 Lhérisson, J. 148, 151, 157 Liberal Insurrection 19, 102–106, 112, 114 Livy 52–55, 99 Lorde, A. 3, 236 Louisiana Purchase 16–17 Louis XVIII 35, 237 Louverture, T. 11, 16–19, 26–36, 53–63, 86–88, 100–101, 194 Lucan 176 Lucian of Samosata 48–50, 182 Lucretia 68, 215 Lucretius 51, 81 Mackandal 205 Magliore, P. 157 Malcolm X 27 Marathon, Battle of 38 Marc Antony 25, 213, 230 Marcelin, F. 111, 115, 151, 157 Marius 85 Mars, J.-P. Ch. 5 (passim); 20, 102–103, 123–132, 151–152, 208, 237 Maya/Mayan 15 Miltiades 38 Moïse, J. 18 Morisseau-Leroy, F. Ch. 6 and 7 (passim); 20, 65, 102–104, 137–176, 180–181, 183–195, 198–199, 204–208, 237–239 Morrison, T. 3, 14, 135 Morton, S. 80–81, 84 Musset, A. de 184 Napoleon and Napoleonic France 1, 12, 16–17, 38, 51, 61–62, 80, 224 necropolitics 20, 164, 167, 175–177, 189–191, 220, 229 négritude 65, 101–105, 130–136 Nero 176 Nkrumah, K. 162–166 Numa, M. 160, 205–207, 211, 237 Obama, B. 3, 34 Oedipus 58, 137–138, 143, 150–151, 165–169, 174–177, 206–207, 214

Ogé, V. 53, 58–63, 101, 113, 170, 205 Oshun 3, 145, 227 Ottoman Empire 35–42, 80, 84, 99–100, 237 Ovid 51, 55, 89–93, 223, 225 Palais Sans-Souci 7–9, 30, 86, 211, 218, 231 pan-Africanism 65, 80, 94, 101–105, 170–171 Parsley Massacre 4, 21, 211, 216–217, 225–229 Penelope 193, 197 Péralte, C. 123, 159, 205 Pétion, A. 3, 8, 30–31, 48, 60–62, 113–114, 218, 224 Petronius 125–126 Philip, M. N. 6, 135, 216 Phillips, W. 86–88, 94 Piketty, T. 43 Pillet, J.-P. 2 Plato 50, 79, 84, 185 Plutarch 55, 87 polis 36–37 Pompey 85–86, 176 Poverel, É. 56 Prometheus 81–83 Protagoras 78, 84 Raymond, G. 20, 160, 182–193, 237 Raynal, A. 26, 87 Rigaud, A. 19, 30, 47–48, 60–61, 87 Rochambeau, V. de 17, 62, 86–88 Romulus: in Hibbert Ch. 4 (passim), 102–103, 105–118, 123–124, 208, 237; and Remus in Bergeaud Ch. 2 (passim), 19, 47–69, 87, 100–101, 113–115, 149, 211, 237; and Remus in Roman mythology 19, 54–57, 63–64, 68, 113–114, 222, 237 Rotimi, O. 57 Sabine women 57, 81 Saint-Domingue see Haiti Saint Thomas 47–48, 106 Salamis, Battle of 38–39 Salem, A. 143, 169 Salomon, L. 19, 105–114 Sappho 126 Saturn (aka, Cronus) 27–32, 39–42 Schoelcher, V. 86–88, 131 Sekle-Kite 146

Index  263 Shelley, P. B. 2, 19, 34, 39–42 Silva, D. F. da 5–6 Sonthonax, L.-F. 56, 62 Sophocles 1, 137–138, 167–168, 176–177, 182–192, 206–207, 219–220 Soulouque, F. (aka, Faustin I) 47–48, 60–61, 158 Soyinka, W. 14, 143, 163–169 Sparta 26, 37–38, 51–52, 58, 85–87, 130–131, 168 Spartacus 26–27, 51, 87, 165 Sphinx 51, 57–58, 80–81, 186–187 Stothard, T. 66–67 Sylvain, B. 94, 102 Sylvain, G. 115, 128–130, 135–138, 142, 151, 157 Tarquinius Superbus 68, 215 Teale, I. 67 Terence 220 Thebes 82–83, 111, 138, 143, 168, 174, 186–187 Thermopylae, Battle of 37–38, 51, 58 Ti-Malice 128, 166 Tonton Macoute 103, 158, 169, 175, 186 Touré, S. 191 Trujillo, R. L. 4, 21, 130–132, 208–231 Trump, D. 18, 188 Turnus 68, 209, 220–222, 227

Ulysses/Odysseus 21, 91–92, 117–118, 147, 181, 193–199, 216, 236–238 U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic 130, 215–217 U.S. occupation of Haiti 13, 16–18, 102–103, 105–106, 124, 136–137, 147–152, 215–222, 237–238 veni, vidi, vici (and variations on this phrase) 9–12, 220 Vertières, Battle of 10, 62, 67, 86, 111 Vieux-Chauvet, M. 24n43 Vincent, S. 217 Virgil 39–40, 67–68, 126, 208–216, 219–231, 236–238 Vodou 19–21, 28–29, 63–65, 102–104, 114–118, 124–126, 129–130, 136–138, 141–152, 157–158, 170–177, 193–198, 216, 237–238 Volney, Comte de 80–81 Walcott, D. 3, 14, 204, 208, 217–223 War of the South (War of Knives) 30, 48, 60–61, 87 Wisdom of Silenus 214, 219 Xerxes 37–39 zonbi (zombie, zombie, zombification) 146–150, 154, 197, 219