avenging history in the former french colonies

Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

Avenging History in the Former French ColoniesAuthor(s): Martin MunroSource: Transition, No. 99 (2008), pp. 18-40Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African and AfricanAmerican Research at Harvard UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20204259 .

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Avenging History in the Former French Colonies

Martin Munro

Revenge is one of the most persistent and ubiquitous of all human urges. The desire for the wounded or the slighted to "get even" has shaped and

continues to shape world history. On a personal level, our individual acts

often bear testimony to a conscious or unconscious desire to avenge our

wounded pride or physical hurt. The desire for revenge is usually generated

by an initial, apparently unprovoked and unwarranted act of aggression or

slight on one's character. Often the perceived offense is against one's family,

nation, or race. The avenger regards himself as an innocent, and the license

that this state of innocence apparently affords him is such that his acts of

vengeance may greatly exceed in degree and kind the initial aggressive act.

Even when acts of vengeance are repeated many times over, the avenger

may still believe himself to be the victim, the slighted one, and vindicated

through each of his serial retaliatory acts. Thus even the most excessively

vengeful avenger-turned-tyrant never casts himself in the role of aggressor, but instead exonerates himself by insisting that he is irrevocably the inno

cent, the hurt, the slighted one.

A sense of national togetherness is founded, in many places, most clearly on a collective feeling of historical wrongdoing and the accompanying shared desire to right history's wrongs. This is especially true in nations

that have emerged from or still labor under forms of European colonial

rule. Sometimes the aggressor/avenger dichotomy is complicated by more

sophisticated, complex colonial relations. In the French overseas d?parte ments d'outre-mer (DOM) of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guyana, for example, colonial bonds have not been completely broken but have

evolved in ways that perpetuate attachment to the French m?tropole and

frustrate the instinct to avenge a barbaric, horrifying history. Aim? C?saire's

classic work Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939) confronts the horrors of

this history by dredging up and displaying images of slave suffering and

juxtaposing them with his own unflinching representation of contemporary Martinican psychological complexes. There is a palpable sense of outrage

in C?saire's poetry, and his position toward Europe and Europeans is largely

antagonistic. Thus he writes to his anonymous European addressee:

18 Transition 99



Accommodez-vous de moi. Je ne m'accommode pas de vous!

[Adapt yourself to me; I'm not adapting myself for you!]

In a similar, though more direct manner, he states his feelings toward

Europe frankly:

Nous vous ha?ssons vous et votre raison.

[We hate you, you and your reason.]

At the same time, however, C?saire's ire is somewhat tempered by another, more

reconciliatory voice, which asks to be preserved from hatred:

Ne faites point de moi cet homme de haine pour qui je n'ai que haine.

[Do not make of me that man of hatred for whom I have nothing but hatred.]

These lines suggest some of the contradictions and paradoxes that C?saire

(and other early pan-Africanists) faced: on the one hand, he felt a visceral

need to express his outrage at Europe for its long physical and psychologi cal subjugation of black Caribbean subjects. On the other hand, he was

drawn to situate his project (and anger) within a universalist, humanist

framework, which seemed to require of him a degree of forbearance and

forgiveness for history's wrongs. C?saire seems to be aware of these diver

gent and, at times, conflicting urges, when he writes in the Cahier.

car pour me cantonner en cette unique race

vous savez pourtant mon amour tyrannique vous savez que ce n'est point par haine des autres races

que je m'exige b?cheur de cette unique race

que ce que je veux

c'est pour la faim universelle

pour la soif universelle

[for to entrench myself in this unique race

you know yet of my tyrannical love

you know that it is not from hatred of other races

that I demand to be the hoer of this unique race

that what I want

is for universal hunger for universal thirst.]

In this way, C?saire's bitter antipathy toward the European is qualified by his universalist voice, which asserts that the process of disalienating his own

Munro Avenging History 19



Edouard Duval

Carri?, Parthenum

Vaudou La Main

Divine. 1997.

Bronze, approx. 25 inches

'||gi??^^

race is but a step toward the liberation of wider humanity. The desire for

revenge is moderated by C?saire's universalism: violence remains a textual,

stylistic phenomenon (bloody images, jarring syntax), but in the poem "Ex-voto pour un naufrage" (1948), he explains that the taste of vengeance remains unfamiliar to him:

et toi tam-tam fr?re pour qu'il m'arrive de garder tout le long du jour un mot tour ? tour chaud et frais dans ma bouche comme le go?t peu connu de la vengeance.

[and you tom-tom brother so that I might all day long keep in my mouth a word in turn hot and fresh like the little-known taste of

vengeance.]

20 Transition 99



C?saire was of course one of the three founding fathers of N?gritude, the

pan-African movement that grew out of the meeting in Paris in the 1930s

of C?saire, the Senegalese Leopold S?dar Senghor, and the Guyanese L?on

Gontran Damas. While the three figures' poetry and vision were quite different in many ways, they did have in common strong anticolonial con

victions and a belief that the neuroses of the black diasporic subject could

be cured by a rediscovery and revalorization of the lost African elements

of his subjectivity. For C?saire, in particular, Africa remained the solution

to the existential and cultural alienation that colonialism had brought to

bear on the Martinican people. C?saire's compatriot Frantz Fanon, however, came to dismiss many of

the tenets of N?gritude?to him Africa was the great black mirage ["le grand

mirage noir")?and to promote violent, vengeful insurrection as the most

effective means of purging the psychological damage inflicted by European colonialism. Fanon famously wrote in the opening lines of Les damn?s de la

terre (1961):

Lib?ration nationale, renaissance nationale, restitution de la nation au

people . . . la d?colonisation est toujours un ph?nom?ne violent.

[National liberation, national renaissance, restitution of the nation

to the people . . . decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.]

Without a complete transition, a revolution in social relations, decolonization

risked simply substituting one "species" of elite, privileged people with another.

Fanon emphasized the need for a violent purgation that would create the

condition of tabula rasa, which he regarded as the minimum demand of the

colonized. Fanon's promotion of vengeful retribution grew out of his involve

ment in Algeria, where the historical, material, and psychological conditions

of the colonized were quite different from those of his native Martinique.

Algeria had not experienced slavery and the horrors of the plantation; its

people had not been abducted from their homeland and systematically stripped of their markers of identity, including their names and their religion and other

cultural practices. The situation of Martinique was more nuanced, more com

plex, and the concept of violent revenge was complicated by the mixed sense of

belonging that many Martinicans came to feel.

Fanon was of course acutely aware of Martinique's peculiar colonial status.

After 1946, when the island became a bona fide d?partement of France (an initiative which had been supported, to some notoriously, by Aim? C?saire), it became increasingly difficult to sustain a dualistic, black-white, colonizer

colonized understanding of social relations and resistance on the island.

Fanon's early work Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks] (1952)




reflected on the psychological and social conditions of Martinique and broadly

critiqued the N?gritude vision of a monolithic, racialized, pan-African culture.

Peau noire, masques blancs casts a skeptical eye toward the mystical aspects of

Africanism, holding it up to the everyday reality of Martinique, where, Fanon

held, the black man wanted to be white. By developing the psychoanalytical

aspects of C?saire's work while abandoning his racial mysticism, Fanon

grounded the analysis of Martinican subjectivity in more tersely scientific,

phenomenological terms, describing his own work as "une ?tude clinique [a clinical study]." From the beginning, Fanon

sought to downplay the connections between

Africa and Martinique, and to debunk the

N?gritude vision regarding the Caribbean's

essential, innate Africanity. In contrast to

C?saire's contention that the Martinican collec

tive unconscious consists of images and memo

ries of Africa, Fanon famously declared that the

Caribbean subject identifies most fundamen

tally with and adopts subjectively the comportment of the European white

man, through developing "une attitude, une habitude de penser et de voir qui sont

essentiellement blanches [an attitude, a way of thinking and of seeing that are

essentially white]." Unlike Algeria, where there were relatively clear differen

tiations between the colonizer and the colonized, in Martinique, the processes of colonialism penetrated so deeply into everyday life and individual con

sciousness that straightforward notions of anticolonial resistance and revenge became untenable.

In writing of the complete and "successful" colony of Martinique, Edouard

Glissant, one of Fanon's contemporaries, evoked a similar notion of the

profound absorption of colonial precepts. Unlike Fanon, however, Glissant

did not turn away from Martinique to seek more reassuringly dualistic

models of resistance. Instead, Glissant made the successful, intricate incor

poration of colonial ideas his primary material, sounding its historical roots

and reflecting on its contemporary implications. The concerns of C?saire

and Fanon?in particular, the question of the psychological effects of colo

nialism?are addressed in Glissant's seminal work Le Discours antillais (1981,

published in English as Caribbean Discourse). However, Glissant draws an

implicit contrast to C?saire's idea of a collective, dormant, racial uncon

scious, and he also takes Fanon's phenomenological interest in lived experi ence in a different direction. For Glissant, there is no ancient body of

knowledge for the Martinican to draw on, no culture or poetics capable of

realizing anything but a "pseudoknowledge" that seeks to deny the complete

Fanon famously declared

that the Caribbean subject

identifies most fundamentally

with and adopts subjectively

the comportment of the

European white man.

22 Transition 99



Edouard

Duval-Carri?,

Pleureurs V.

2002. Mixed

media on canvas

in artist frame,

33 x 33 inches

Edouard

Duval-Carri?,

Pleureurs VI.

2002. Mixed

media on canvas

in artist frame,

33 x 33 inches




Edouard Duval-Carri?, La

Hydre et Son Butin. 2002.

Mixed media on paper in artist

frame, 87 x 60 x 2.5 inches

and corrosive hold of the European Other. The slave trade is for Glissant

the primary source of Martinican trauma and alienation, and all the more

because its memory has been systematically repressed. Having been forcibly removed from their "matrice originelle [original matrix]" fixed the Martinican

people in a constant emotional and identifying tug with Africa, one which

they must paradoxically fight against if they are to ever to truly belong in

Martinique. Glissant insists, contrary to C?saire, on the need to largely

forget Africa?even as the memory of slavery must be properly instated

within Martinican consciousness?for the motherland is something irrecov

erable, "la terre inaccessible [the inaccessible land]." What for Glissant makes Martinican alienation all the more pervasive and

difficult to resist or avenge is that it and its workings are not readily visible.

Rather than clearly constituted catastrophe, Martinicans are beset by

les accumulations obscures du malheur, l'usure m?connue des peuples coinc?s, les disparitions insensibles, la lente perte d'identit?, la

souffrance sans ?chos.

[the shadowy accretions of misfortune, the unseen erosion of a

cornered people, the unnoticed disappearance, the slow loss of

identity, the suffering without consequence.]

The only way to resist or avenge this collective and silent death is through

poetics, the implicit or explicit manipulation of self-expression. But this is more

than a mere technique; it also represents an opportunity to shed light on the

24 Transition 99



Edouard Duval-Carri?,

La D?mocratie en Marche

2003. Mixed media on

paper in artist frame, 87 x

60 x 2.5 inches. Courtesy of Bernice Steinbaum

Gallery, Miami, Florida

great human waste of Martinique, an awareness of Martinicans' place in the

world, and their necessary and disalienated relationship with the Other.

For Glissant, one of the fundamental aspects of the Martinican's alien

ation is his relationship with the island space, or "anti-espace [antispace]," as

Glissant terms it. The land is unloved and abandoned, and the freed slave

prefers to live marginalized in urban areas rather than take possession of

the land, for it has historically been associated with the white Other and

with alienating, forced work. History has thus created a distorted relation

ship with the land and an accompanying poetics of excess: the scream, the

cry (most likely of N?gritude) through which all is exhausted immediately. The Martinican land becomes a site upon which various kinds of histori

cally inherited madness and neurosis?the impossibility of belonging, the

compensatory urge for excess and exhaustion?are projected.

The Martinican subject's physical, material, and psychological existence

complicates, again, the notions of resistance and revenge. The black

Martinican in Glissant's work typically seeks vengeance through what the

author calls d?tour: resistance through indirection. D?tour has reflections in

the African American trope of Signifying] discussed by Henry Louis Gates,




Jr., and others, and is exemplified, according to Glissant, in a situation of

domination where there is no direct confrontation, but rather an opaque set

of hidden, indirect acts of resistance. In contrast to C?saire's dichotomous,

black/white model of resistance, Glissant's d?tour is a means of resisting the

very particular oppression occulted by Martinique's status as a French d?parte ment and the notional identification that the island shares with the m?tropole. The dominated group must look elsewhere for the source of its domination,

which is not directly tangible. D?tour becomes the ultimate resort of a popula tion whose domination by an Other has become concealed. Glissant's coun

terpoetics of indirect resistance does not emanate spontaneously or innocently from everyday communication, but instead represents the unconscious rhythm of daily communication, an instinctive denial that has not been?and perhaps

will not be?structured into a conscious and collective denial. Thus Glissant

took up many of the themes and tropes of C?saire and Fanon, and reworked

them according to his own vision of Martinique as a uniquely equal-but

repressed place, an antispace that perpetuated what was the slaves' sentiment

of exile, and also a distorted relationship with time.

Guadeloupean author Daniel Maximin writes in the Glissantian tradition,

describing the French Antillean people as at once the most alienated from

Europe and the least hungry in the Third World. Where C?saire reaches for

Africa, Maximin's characters often look to North America. (Glissant looks

more insistently inward, especially in his earlier works). In his epic novel

L'Isol? soleil (1981), Maximin explores themes similar to Glissant's, creating French Caribbean characters who are caught in the dilemmas of split, obscured identity. The protagonist Adrien, for example, projects outward for

sources of inspiration in ways that suggest the theorized French Caribbean

sentiments of alienation and powerlessness. When Adrien moves to Paris, he

feels less alienated than he did in Guadeloupe, where the island sun had been

hiding from him the shadow of his double, an unknown part of him which

did not trouble his solitude until his departure. Adrien becomes aware of his

double on the first day of school in Paris, when, upon being kicked, he is able

to react calmly, mastering his aggression, shame, and disdain. He relates this

doubling to the need he feels to prove himself as a black and to, in a sense,

represent his race in the colonial m?tropole. Thus, in addition to proving himself a good basketball player (which is expected of him as a black teen

ager), he tries also to display his brilliance in English, French (through his

love of poetry), and history and geography, in order to open himself up to

the world by breaking down prejudice. But Adrien also views his success in

school as a kind of revenge against his former teacher, a racist. Even if, there

fore, the concept of direct, violent anticolonial revenge is less present in French

Caribbean writing, the fundamental urge to speak and write back?and

thereby to achieve a kind of vengeance?persists and permeates virtually

every expression of this pleiad of Caribbean authors.

26 Transition 99



Haiti, with a spectacular history of anticolonial retribution, is perhaps the

postcolonial state most starkly and unequivocally founded on revenge. In con

trast to the French Caribbean d?partement islands with their history of occulted,

though persistent, vengeful desire, in Haiti, the notion of righteous revenge was

inscribed directly into the 1804 Proclamation of Independence, which declared

that the spirits of the dead who had died at the hands of the French "barbar

ians" demanded revenge, and liberty had to be protected from them:

Ce n'est pas assez d'avoir expuls? de votre pays les barbares qui l'ont

ensanglant? depuis deux si?cles; ce n'est pas assez d'avoir mis un frein aux factions toujours renaissantes qui se jouaient tour ? tour du fant?me de libert? que la France exposait ? vos yeux; il faut, par un dernier acte

d'autorit? nationale assurer ajam?is l'empire de la libert? dans le pays

qui nous a vus na?tre; il faut ravir au gouvernement inhumain, qui tient

depuis longtemps nos esprits dans la torpeur la plus humiliante, tout

espoir de nous r?asservir; il faut enfin vivre ind?pendant ou mourir.

[It is not enough to have expelled from your country the

barbarians who have been spilling blood here for two centuries; it

is not enough to have suppressed the ever-renewing factions that

played each in its turn with the phantom of liberty that France laid

before you; it is necessary, by a final act of national authority to

safeguard liberty in our country of birth forever; it is necessary to

take away from the inhuman government that held our souls for so

long in the most humiliating torpor, all hope of re-enslaving us; we

must finally live free or die.]

In defense of liberty, Dessalines had already proclaimed after his November

29, 1803, victory, no means would be too extreme. No matter the scale and

nature of the revenge, the avengers would remain innocent. According to

the 1804 Proclamation, it was necessary to provide a terrible, but just,

example of the vengeance that a people proud of having won back its lib

erty, and ready to jealously preserve it, must exercise. In the early months

of Haitian independence, Dessalines, the Haitian avenger par excellence, made good on his threats, as he ordered a series of massacres of white

inhabitants of the new nation whom he suspected of complicity in the terror

that the French had wreaked on the colony during its final year. While the

postrevolution slaughter of whites was interpreted by outsiders as a sign of

the new nation's inherent barbarity, to Dessalines it was necessary for the

preservation of the Haitian people's hard-won freedom. It was, moreover, a justified act of vengeance, since the implacable enemies of the rights of

man had to be punished for their crimes, and "the ax" had to be taken to




the tree of slavery and prejudice. In Dessalines's view, the Haitian people were mutilated victims of the French whites, who could justifiably exact

revenge on their former oppressors according to the eye-for-an-eye model

of retribution. Dessalines, who in a rhetorical flourish referred to the French

as "les vrais cannibales [the true cannibals]," presented himself as the savior

not only of his nation, but also of the entire hemisphere, when he cried out:

J'ai sauv? mon pays. J'ai veng? l'Am?rique.

[I have saved my country; I have avenged America.]

The grotesque violence of slavery and colonialism had in some sense

made the arrival of the hemispheric avenger inevitable. Revenge was a fated

act, precipitated by the unsustainable nature of the institutions that kept slaves in bondage, thus creating a formidable repository of slaves' pent-up

righteous anger and desire for revenge. Such vengeful "overcoming" was

predicted by the French author Louis-S?bastien Mercier in his 1771 work

L'An deux mille quatre cents quarante: R?ve s'il en f?t jamais (published in

English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred), a time-travel

fable that projected the author 669 years into the future, waking up in a

new, perfected world. In Mercier's novel, the French time traveler sees on

a pedestal in a plaza with his arm outstretched a black man whose eyes

gleam with pride, and who presents a noble and imposing demeanor.

Underneath the statue reads: "To the Avenger of the New World!" This

avenger, the narrator learns, delivered the world from the most atrocious

and insulting tyranny of all, by spilling the blood of the tyrants:

French, Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese all fell prey to iron,

poison, and flame. The soil of America avidly drank the blood that

it had been awaiting for so long, and the bones of their ancestors, murdered by cowards, seemed to stand up and shake with joy.

The fictional avenger was thus an exterminating angel, vindicated and granted

power and justice by God. Yet, in many ways, Dessalines himself was just such an exterminating angel, an uncompromising, justified avenger who

would stop at nothing but absolute retribution. Dessalines's example of

fierce vengeance inscribed itself deeply in the Haitian imagination, and

indeed the vodou religion, which came to deify him alone of all the leaders

of the revolution.

At the same time, however, Haitian history offers a somewhat divergent model of retributive behavior. As C. L. R.James and others have suggested, Toussaint L'Ouverture may have read and been inspired by the Abb? Raynal's famous history of European colonialism, first published in the 1770s, and

which, like Mercier's work, also prophesied the future rightful retribution of

28 Transition 99



Edouard

Duval-Carri?,

Le G?n?ral

Toussaint

Enfum?. 2003.

Mixed media on

wood in artist

frame, 127 x 127

cm. Collection

Nazon, Cap Haitien

enslaved Africans. All that the negros lacked, Raynal famously wrote, was a

leader courageous enough to carry them all the way to vengeance and car

nage. Such a leader would, along with his fellow rebel slaves, leave everywhere the unmistakable traces of just resentment. Toussaint's career was of course

marked by instances of vengeance and carnage: in 1799, following a con

spiracy instigated against him by Andr? Rigaud, Toussaint had the suspected

conspirators mercilessly killed. When his adopted nephew Mo?se challenged Toussaint's draconian rule, the leader infamously ordered his summary execu

tion. In his famous Camp Turel proclamation of August 1793, the leader

affirmed that exacting revenge was one of his fundamental aims:

Je suis Toussaint L'Ouverture, mon nom s'est peut-?tre fait conna?tre

jusqu'? vous. J'ai entrepris la vengeance de ma race. Je veux que la libert?

et l'?galit? r?gnent ? Saint-Domingue. Je travaille ? les faire exister.

Unissez-vous ? nous, fr?res, et combattez avec moi pour la m?me cause.

[I am Toussaint L'Ouverture, perhaps my name has made itself

known to you. I have undertaken the vengeance of my race. I

want Liberty and Equality to reign in Saint-Domingue. I am

working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.]




Edouard Duval

Carri?, La

Migration des

B?tes. 2000. Oil

on canvas in artist

frame. 80 x 78

inches. Collection

of Lanster Family,

Miami, Florida

If in many instances Toussaint's vengeful ire equaled that of Dessalines, he

was also known for clemency and forgiveness, particularly with respect to the

former grands blancs, the white plantation owners. In mid-August 1798, after a

solemn mass, Toussaint declared that, in accordance with Catholic teaching, he would pardon those?chiefly grands blancs?who had sinned by supporting the British occupation of Saint-Domingue and subsequently fled the island. In

September ofthat same year, Toussaint called for the return to Saint-Domingue of the ?migr?s to the United States, promising that they would be welcomed

and pardoned like prodigal sons returning to their father. While Toussaint's

clemency was often strategically advantageous to him, and although Dessalines

and his other generals often carried out the dirty work of retribution for him, Toussaint has remained in the popular and historical imagination a more

moderate, forgiving figure than most of his rebel contemporaries. Thus, for

example, in Madison Smartt Bell's All Souls' Rising (1995), a historical novel

about the life of the Haitian leader, in the midst of the retributive violence of

the slave uprising, Toussaint encounters the (white) French doctor Antoine

H?bert, who has been hiding from the rebels in his pursuit. Rather than having H?bert killed, Toussaint spares his life, evincing empathy with the doctor,

acknowledging the fear and uncertainty that he, too, shares.

30 Transition 99



The historical images of the merciful Toussaint and the vengeful Dessalines

have to some extent been insinuated into modes of behavior in post-inde

pendence Haiti, most recognizably in politics. Although Toussaint's clem

ency in some cases suggested that revenge was not inevitable or fated and

that moderation and reconciliation would also be vital to the nation's future, the post-independence history of Haiti has, notoriously, been largely char

acterized by Dessalinian cycles of revenge and retribution. From 1860 to

the present, Haiti has had more than thirty-five presidents, only five of

whom were able to complete their terms in office. One died of natural

causes; one died when his palace was blown up; one was poisoned; another

had his body dismembered by an angry mob; two resigned; and the others

were overthrown or threatened by political insurrection. Even earlier, Dessalines himself had ironically met with his own revenge-motivated demise at Pont Rouge, during a devastating civil war that had split the north

and the south of the country. Like Dessalines, the two rival leaders, Henri Christophe of the north

and Alexandre P?tion of the south, were tyrants who maintained political control by military force. Like Dessalines and Toussaint before them, both

Christophe and P?tion implemented a militarized agricultural system that

was deeply unpopular among the mass of cultivators forced to work in

conditions barely distinguishable from those of slave labor. The socioeco

nomic systems instituted by Dessalines and consolidated by Christophe created the rigid social structures?a disenfranchised black rural peasantry and a relatively privileged mulatto urban elite?that came to characterize

Haitian society and continues through today. The formerly free blacks, most

of whom had lost their land through state annexations, were now employed

by the state as agricultural inspectors and plantation overseers, or else as

bureaucrats executing other state functions.

The Haitian Revolution was not only a conflict between invading, white

foreigners and a united front of black inhabitants. It also involved an endlessly

complex series of internecine struggles?all with winners and losers?that left

an enormous residue of internal resentment and a legacy of scores to be set

tled. The urge to avenge did not, therefore, end with the declaration of inde

pendence, but persisted and was even exacerbated in the post-independence era. Throughout this fraught history, Toussaint has been like a specter, forgot ten and expelled, along with his oft-ignored message of clemency.

The persistent cycle of political revenge and retribution throughout the

nineteenth century weakened Haiti, making the nation vulnerable to outside

influence. The cycle reached one of its periodic climaxes in July 1915, when

President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the scourge of his wealthy mulatto

political opponents, ordered the execution of 167 political prisoners,




including the former president, Oreste Zamor. As news of the executions

spread, a vengeful mob hunted down Sam in the French Embassy where

he had sought refuge. Upon finding him, the mob beat him and threw his

body over the embassy's fence to the crowd of people outside, who pro ceeded to tear the president's corpse to pieces. For the U.S. government, this was one bloody political crisis too many, in response to which they invaded and occupied Haiti for the next nineteen years.

The U.S. occupation from 1915 to 1934 mitigated to some extent the

vengeful urges of Haiti's divided society or, rather, redirected them toward

the occupying forces. With a visibly different foreign occupier to contend

with, Haiti could fall back into its anticolonial mode, and refocus its desire

for retribution onto the white Americans. In this way, revenge became once

again morally justified, and cases of organized resistance, such as

Charlemagne P?ralte's Caco revolt of 1918-1920, recalled the revolutionary

spirit of old. Without the advent of the U.S. occupation, it is unlikely that

the generally cohesive, more unified nationalist ideology of indigenism could have emerged and implanted itself so deeply within twentieth-century

Haitian culture. Fueled by the renewed spirit of a united, national resistance,

indigenism replaced the destructive internecine vengefulness with a new

feeling of common Haitian culture and identity. In April 1928, Georges Petit and Jacques Roumain called for a union of all factions and classes.

Faced with the U.S. oppressor, the distinctions between black and mulattos, rich and poor, became less important to Haitians united once again against a common enemy, and now, as Petit and Roumain put it, a "masse unie par les m?mes aspirations, les m?mes souffrances [mass united by the same aspira

tions, the same suffering]."

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The major works of Haitian indigenism were narratives of reconciliation

and r?int?gration. Jean Price-Mars's Ainsi parla l'oncle [Thus Spoke the

Uncle] (1928) effectively sought to reconcile Haitian intellectualism with the

long-neglected Africanized aspects of Haitian folk culture, while Roumain's

novel Gouverneurs de la ros?e (1944) offered a parable of forgiveness, in which

the savior figure Manuel returns from exile in Cuba to his native village in Haiti, preaching a message of reconciliation and collective struggle.

When Manuel is fatally wounded by the vengeful Gervilen, the dying hero

is asked by his mother to tell her the name of his assailant so that she can

let Manuel's comrade Hilari?n know whom he must find in order to avenge Manuel's death. Manuel refuses, however, to reveal the name, saying that

to do so would be to initiate yet another cycle of hatred and revenge. Roumain's savior thus lets his own blood spill, unrequited, in the hope of

a broader reconciliation and the coming of a new, unified future.

Roumain's parable, and his call for reconciliation, fell largely on deaf

ears. By the time Gouverneurs de la ros?e was published, it had already been

ten years since the Americans had left Haiti, and the national solidarity that had characterized the occupation had once again disintegrated into

new factional disputes. Indigenism had been held together by the shared




impulse to resist the United States; after 1934, the question of national

reconstitution became all the more pressing, and the various Haitian fac

tions became even more polarized. With the end of the U.S. occupation, indigenism effectively split into two

opposing groups: the Marxists and the Africanists or later Noiristes. Marxists

such as Roumain, much like the nineteenth-century Haitian intellectuals

Louis Joseph Janvier and Ant?nor Firmin, tended to look outward, and to

interpret Haitian society and history from a more internationalist perspective,

according to which Haitians needed to be aware of global cultures, as citizens

of the world. In contrast, the Africanist movement in post-occupation Haiti,

including figures such as Carl Brouard, Lorimer

Denis, and Fran?ois Duvalier, tended to look

inward and to further elaborate the theories of

race and culture that had begun with earlier

investigations into "l'?me ha?tienne [the Haitian

soul]." But the Africanists also reintroduced and

reinvigorated the trope of internecine revenge, seeking retribution for what they considered to be the injustices of Haitian history, in particular, the economic

and political marginalization of the black population by the mulatto elite.

The long, dark period of Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986) was essen

tially a time of ruthlessly repeated revenge, of retribution carried out on

behalf of tyrants who could call on a history of color and class domination

to rationalize vengeful atrocities. From his first days in office, Fran?ois Duvalier mercilessly eliminated his opponents. Just two weeks after his

election, he ordered the arrests of hundreds of political opponents and, in

collaboration with the equally merciless Cl?ment Barbot, head of the secret

police, Duvalier's adversaries were systematically tracked down, beaten, and killed. The rising swirl of revenge and hatred of the post-occupation

period is well presented in perhaps the greatest literary work of the era,

Marie Vieux Chauvet's 1968 trilogy Amour, col?re et folie [Love, Anger, and

Madness]. Amour is set in 1939, during the presidency of St?nio Vincent, who exacted violent retribution on upper-class, light-skinned Haitians, who

had never fully accepted him as a legitimate president. Amour indirectly charts the rise of black nationalism in everyday Haitian life, culminating

with Duvalier's election in 1957.

Vieux Chauvet's work describes and enacts cycles of revenge that are

perpetuated essentially by individual alienation, but are ultimately the

consequence of color and class prejudice. Amour plays on and inverts these

prejudices by inventing a narrator who is doubly alienated: the protagonist Claire is a dark-skinned woman in a light-skinned bourgeois family. As

such, she is set apart from her family and social milieu by her dark skin.

At the same time, her bourgeois background differentiates her from the

dark-skinned lower classes. Her double alienation?by color and

Haitian authors portray a

regressive self-defeating

process that leads the hero

from life into nothingness.

34 Transition 99



class?seems to limit her physically, and she spends practically all of her

time within the walls of the family home, erased, as she says, like a shadow.

Her isolation feeds her feelings of resentment and incubates her desire for

revenge. This desire is focused on Commander Cal?du, whom she describes

as a black imbecile, and who avenges his own experience of color discrimi

nation by raping lighter-skinned, middle-class women.

Claire's initial solution to her alienation was naively to seek the love of

the white Frenchman Jean Luze, but she comes to realize that such a solu

tion is impossible, and that in her revenge-driven society there remains a

single inescapable truth: one can respond to hatred only with more hatred.

The novel's fundamental question, Where does all of this hatred come from? is posed by the outsider, Jean Luze. The answer, it is suggested, is that

hatred is a colonial heritage to which the Haitian people have clung: "We

have been slitting each other's throats since Independence." But the hatred

is not only an externally projected phenomenon; it is also directed by Claire

toward herself, who feels a deep sense of self-hatred. By the end of the novel, Claire's self-deprecation develops into a desire to kill herself. However, as

she prepares to commit suicide, she hears cries from the street when a revolt




breaks out against the police. The commander Cal?du strays into the porch of her house, and she stabs him three times, wounding him fatally. In the

final scene of the novel, Claire is once again in her room, contemplating the blood on her hands, while outside in the streets a popular uprising rages. In a sense, then, Claire's killing of Cal?du constitutes a surrogate for her

own suicide. As in Roumain's Gouverneurs de la ros?e, and indeed many other

Haitian novels, blood has apparently to be spilled in order to bring to an

end a particular cycle of violence and revenge. Vieux Chauvet's Claire reflects the qualities of the quintessentially

Haitian antihero, a recurring figure who follows an inverted trajectory that

does not typically culminate in liberation or exaltation. Instead, as

Maximilien Laroche has observed in his essay, "La lutte du h?ros contre sa

victimisation [The hero's struggle against victimization]" (1994), Haitian

authors portray a regressive, self-defeating process that leads the hero from

life into nothingness. The Haitian antihero also has an important anti

ideological function, for he transforms an individual decline into a collective

deliverance. This figure is an avenger, as Laroche explains:

Le h?ros, dans le r?cit ha?tien, se fait zombie parmi les zombis pour

donner ? tous le sel lib?rateur. Et c'est en acceptant sa condition de

victime, en la faisant reconna?tre donc qu'il la d?nonce, et par l? m?me

s'attaque ? la victimisation dont il est, avec les siens, l'objet.

[In Haitian writing, the hero makes himself a zombie amongst zombies in order to free the community. And it is by accepting his

victimhood, by acknowledging it, that he denounces it, and thereby attacks the victimization to which he and his people are subject.]

Patterns of recognition and vengeful victimhood recur time and again in Haitian literature and in the post-Duvalier period have been revisited

through the works of Evelyne Trouillot, whose L' il-totem (2006) deals with

themes of color prejudice, rape, and repentance. Edwidge Danticat's char

acters are often caught at some stage of the cycle of revenge and retribution:

Martine in Breath, Eyes, Memory, like Vieux Chauvet's Claire, is suicidal,

and finally avenges her rape by killing herself. Yanick Lahens's short story "La mort en juillet [Death in July]" (1994) offers distinct echoes of both

Roumain and Vieux Chauvet. Lahens's work reflects the persistence of the

Roumain-like model of clannish feuding and revenge in Haitian writing. Set in an anonymous country village, "La mort en juillet" reads like a par

able, although its moral principle is more obscure. The murderer in Lahens's

story is named, ironically perhaps, Lazarre; he is in fact a kind of inverted

Lazarus, bringing death to the stranger Janet, the enigmatic lover of

Lazarre's sister, Marie ?lise. This act of killing recalls the terms of Roumain's

family feud, for it, too, is the expression and satisfaction of an ancient anger

36 Transition 99



and suppressed fury. Lahens reveals that the people are linked to each other

by pacts, prohibitions, and alliances; they are also subject to the poverty of

the earth and the capriciousness of the dry and rainy seasons. Their world, like the world of Roumain's Vodouisant community, has an order, which

they regard as willed by God, the Iwa, and the saints.

Lahens's story is a conscious retelling of Roumain's novel, representing similar figures and situations, but it refuses the redemptive conclusion,

leaving vengeful death to linger in the silent memory as a futile, meaning less act. By simultaneously re-invoking and undermining Roumain's novel,

Lahens suggests the continued, if muted, presence of hatred and revenge in the Haitian imagination, and also the need to rethink these persistent

tropes in less simplistically redemptive terms.

Hatred and revenge course through Haitian history in endless cycles of

retribution, which in turn create a sense that time does not progress or change in any kind of teleological way, but instead turns in cycles, repeating itself

endlessly, a perspective on Haitian experience which has been articulated

by both Emile Ollivier and Ren? Depestre, among others. It is in large mea

sure the cycle of revenge and

hatred itself that creates this circu

lar temporality, the feeling that

time is still turning in circles inher

ited from the past, and that present time is in many respects indistin

guishable from any moment over

the course of the last two hundred

years. While there may be longstanding historical and political reasons for

Haiti's hateful, vengeful cycles, history has nevertheless shown that the lust

for retribution will at some point rebound on the avenger, and that the nation

will be fatally weakened by this endlessly self-destructive pattern. Hatred

does not liberate one from the object of animosity; on the contrary, it binds

one inevitably to him. To hate, as Aim? C?saire wisely observed, is still to

depend on the other.

The term revenge derives from the Latin verb vindicare, to vindicate. The

root of the word revenge suggests that vengeful acts are not motivated simply

by the brutish desire to inflict suffering, but are fed by deeper human needs

for recognition, exoneration, and vindication. If one is suffering in any way, one seeks and requires recognition ofthat suffering as a means to deliverance.

In Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, history has brought many sources of

suffering. In the case of Martinique and Guadeloupe, a sort of vindication

came with departmentalization, and the recognition by France that these

France's recognition of Martinique and

Guadeloupe as parts of the French

nation legitimizes Martinicans and

Guadeloupeans; but it is also, less

obviously, an act of self-vindication.




places and people were legitimate parts of the French nation. This was of

course a certain kind of vindication: a recognition that the people of Martinique and Guadeloupe were legitimately French. However this was also to some

extent a denial of difference.

When Charles de Gaulle famously proclaimed his surprise in 1966 to a

crowd in Fort-de-France at how "French" they were, he effectively laid bare

the kind of vindication that France offers its overseas colonies-turned-?/?/>flr?? ments, which has not to this day offered a true deliverance from history, nor a

recognition of the particular historical suffering of the former colonies' people. When, upon Aim? C?saire's death, Nicolas Sarkozy called the Martinican a

great man and a man of liberty who helped to develop French consciousness, he vindicated C?saire in much the same way as de Gaulle had done to the

Martinican people more generally. In both cases Martinicans were but

embodiments of French values, enriched by and enriching France and its

republican values. France's recognition of Martinique and Guadeloupe as

parts of the French nation legitimizes Martinicans and Guadeloupeans; but it

is also, less obviously, an act of self-vindication, of exonerating France itself

38 Transition 99



and not truly recognizing the historical suffering its colonial enterprise

inflicted, which was further pursued though Sarkozy's endorsement in 2005

of a bill lauding the "positive role" of French colonialism. For these reasons,

revenge for contemporary Martinican and Guadeloupean intellectuals has

inhered in opaque, indirect gestures, in a kind of cultural and linguistic ven

geance that seeks through these means a deeper, more meaningful vindication.

In Haiti's case, political vindication came very early, as did deliverance

from colonialism and slavery. The residual conflicts of class and color in

Haiti have however ensured the perpetuation of cycles of revenge, to the

extent that it is no longer clear who, if anyone, is morally justified in exact

ing revenge. A scene in Lyonel Trouillot's novel Bicentenaire (2004) depicts an impoverished mother who beats her children for hitting each other, and

the narrator remarks on the impossibility of identifying who the torturers

are and who the victims. In effect, Haiti's long history of internal conflict

and revenge radically disrupts our understanding of who is exacting and

who is suffering the torture. It also complicates the morality of vengeance in Haiti, so much so that we might conclude with Nietzsche?the great

philosopher of ressentiment and tragedy?that putatively "evil" acts are moti

vated most profoundly by the individual's drive to preservation, by the

intention to procure pleasure and avoid displeasure, and as such are not

purely evil. Morality, and the notion that mankind performs categorically "evil" acts, relies on the supposition that we all possess, equally and con

stantly, free will. But we might still reasonably ask what level of free will

starving, impoverished people possess. We might ask what choice one has

when one cannot feed one's family from day to day, and when the rising cost of food hangs over one's family like a

deadly portent of an even more

wretched future. We might see that events like the food riots taking place in Haiti and elsewhere are acts of revenge?a hungry man is, indeed, an

angry man?but that revenge is driven by physical hunger and a very human

hunger to survive, to be recognized, vindicated, and delivered.




Edouard Duval-Carri?

The artist whose work is featured on the cover of Transition 99 and

throughout Martin Munro's "Avenging History in the Former French

Colonies" has a passionate love affair with his native Haiti but maintains

a critical perspective toward what he views as the state's suspension in

mythic timelessness and entrenched stereotypes. Duval-Carri? decon

structs the postcolonial realities of both retrograde provincialism and

romantic bourgeois traditions through paintings that fuse African fables, classic mythology, and Haitian and global history. Toussaint Planant

portrays legendary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture in a quest to avenge the wrongs done to the Haitians brought by force to the island by slave

traders from Africa. This quest to avenge history continues today. The slaves arrived in Haiti with sets of beliefs that came to comprise

vodou. This religious tradition has been the abiding soul of Haiti, the

essence that has permitted Haitians to emancipate themselves, and

which is as valid today for the majority of Haitians as it was two hundred

years ago. Still, vodou has gone underground; it is now a religion on the

margin. The artist's work forces the viewer to consider this fact of life

in Haiti, while at the same time asking why Haiti has been forgotten by the great powers of the world. In much of his work, Duval-Carri?

attempts to return the vodou world and its deities back to the Haitian

people, and also to teach us.

Duval-Carri?'s career encompasses a few decades and a wide range

of media, including painting, sculpture, and large-scale installations.

The artist has also recently delved into filmmaking and animation to

accompany a full-scale opera in the works titled "Makandal."

/ have tried to analyze the historical context of the genesis of Haiti, that

partial island nation, looked at the strife and suffering that brought the

former society of slaves and slave masters to the point of ebullition. I

look closely at the savagery on both parts of the struggle, understanding and giving my total sympathy to the downtrodden, not realizing that

patterns are easily learned and extremely resilient to alteration. The

patterns referred to are those of extreme violence, the type that never looks

back?the type that finds a certain comfort in its inevitability. I have

scrutinized the successive generations of pathetic leaders and their sordid

entourages. From the operetta emperor to the demented shaman, they all

have surpassed each other in the deepening hole of that grave that they have dug for their all-adoring peasantry and <(urban masses,

" as they

are called today. All of this under the glaring sun of the Tropics.

?Edouard Duval-Carri?

40 Transition 99



avenging history in the former french colonies

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