Forsdick on Smartt Bell

8/13/2019 Forsdick on Smartt Bell

1/16

small axe 23June 2007 p 194208 ISSN 0799-0537

Madison Smartt Bells Toussaintat the Crossroads: The HaitianRevolutionary between Historyand Fiction

Charles Forsdick

ABSTRACT:Central to Madison Smartt Bells trilogy of novels on the Haitian Revolution is the char-

acter of Toussaint Louverture. The article considers how Bells Toussaint ts into two centuries of

representations of the revolutionary leader, exploring in particular the ways in which his character

is to be situated between historiography and ction. It addresses the extensive documentary

foundations of Bells ctional account, while highlighting the imagined interpretations essential

to this reguring of the revolutionary.

From a historical viewpoint, Madison Smartt Bells accomplishments take their full significance against

the background of the monumental silence that his novel helps to break.

So much that is purely legendary has been written about oussaint Louverture and so little trustworthy

source material exists that it is extremely difficult for one with no gift for fiction to attempt a complete

story of his life.

With the representation of oussaint Louverture progressively internationalized in the two

centuries following his death, the afterlives of the Haitian revolutionary embody, in a variety

of ways, the complex historical impact of the events in which he played an instrumental role.

Michel-Rolph rouillot, Bodies and Souls: Te Haitian Revolution and Madison Smartt Bells1. All Souls Rising,in Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront Americas Past (and Each Other), ed. Mark C. Carnes (New York:Simon and Schuster, 2001), 184. I shall use the following abbreviations to refer to Bells trilogy: All Souls Rising(New York: Vintage, 2004 [1995]) (All Souls);Master of the Crossroads(New York: Vintage, 2004 [2000]) (Master);and Te Stone the Builder Refused(New York: Pantheon, 2004) (Stone).Percy Waxman,2. Te Black Napoleon(New York: Harcourt, 1931), 5.


2/16

SX23June 2007 Charles Forsdick |195

Te geographical and cultural range of this refiguring is wide, encompassing Europe and

sub-Saharan Africa, and stretching even to Soviet Russia, where Anatolii Vinogradovs novel

Te Black Consulinspired Sergei Eisenstein to plan a filmunfinished , like so many of his

projectsof the same title. Privileged, however, in this field are representations of what might

be classed a hemispheric oussaint, forging connections across the Americas, most notably

within the Caribbean itself, but also in Latin America and (to a greater extent) the United

States. In North America, the instrumentalization of Louverture in abolitionist debates began

early in the nineteenth century, although, as the work of Frederick Douglass (with its early

silencing of oussaint) makes clear, he remained an ambiguous figure, an example of black

exceptionalism operating as both inspiration and threat. During the US occupation of Haiti

(19151934), the hero of the revolution achieved a new prominence, notably in the artistic

and political activity surrounding the Harlem Renaissance (not least in Jacob Lawrences

forty-one-panel Life of oussaint Louverture) and in several Federal Teater Project productions

(such as William Du Boiss Haiti, and Orson Welless Voodoo Macbeth). Following World War

II, explorations of the meanings of oussaint continued to proliferate, with a series of novels

of varying literary value and ideological impact challenged by the revolutionarys adoption in

the work of new generations of African-American writers whoin texts as different as Ralph

Ellisons Mister oussan and Ntozake Shanges for colored girls who have considered suicide

when the rainbow is not enufhave responded to their subjects persistent presence in the

politico-cultural imagination.

It is in this complex representational fieldin which oussaint is variously demonized,

eulogized, trivialized, and otherwise instrumentalized according to the authors purposes

that Madison Smartt Bells fictional trilogy, charting the rise and supposed fall of the Haitian

revolutionary, is to be situated. In a moment of metatextual self-awareness, Bell alludes to the

emergent stages of these processes of representational sedimentation of which his novels con-

stitute one of the most recent, most striking, and most exhaustive contributions. As oussaints

wife and family are seized at Ennery in the concluding chapter of Te Stone the Builder Rejected,

Captain Cyprien attempts to pilfer an ornament from the Consul-Generals mantelpiece:

Captain Cyprien was doing his best to stuff the vase depicting oussaints triumphs into the pocket

of his coat, though it was too large to fit.

Captain, Isaac said. I did not take you for a thief. Tat is my fathers property.

See Alfred N. Hunt,3. Haitis Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean(Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 84101, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Emblems of Barbarism: Black Mas-culinity and Representations of oussaint LOuverture in Frederick Douglasss Unpublished Manuscripts,AmericanNineteenth Century History4, no. 3 (2003): 97120.


3/16

196 |SX23Madison Smartt Bells Toussaint at the Crossroads

At once another grenadier backed him to the wall with a bayonet to his throat, and one of

General Brunets aides-de-camp turned from the mantel to sneer, Your father has no property.

(Stone, 685)

Te artefact in question, already examined earlier in the volume by Isaac Louverture, shortly

after his return to Saint-Domingue, is a gray-and-green vase decorated with images of certain

battle triumphs of oussaint Louverturevictories over the Spanish and the English, renderedin the classically heroic manner. (Stone, 222)

Here is another example of the dozens of concrete objects that accumulate throughout

the course of Bells narrative: jewelry, trinket boxes, clothing, wigs, musical instruments,

and other trappings of late eighteenth-century culture, constituting the possessions used to

characterize the libertine colony of the pre-revolutionary period. Te destruction or redis-

tribution of the artefacts marks the development of new social formations. Te commemora-

tive vase is, however, in addition, one of several recurrent items whose resilience to changing

circumstancesas well as association with other key itemsunderlines its symbolic value:

Placide returned him Brunets letter [inviting Louverture to the meeting that would result inhis arrest] and oussaint secured it under the moss-colored vase with the white frieze depicting

his victories over the English. Isaac had rescued the vase, miraculously unbroken, from the

ashes of the Sanceygrandcase. (Stone, 681) On its third appearance, as Cyprien attempts to

seize it, the vase operates on at least two distinct levels. On the one hand, its attempted theft

reflects the destitution and symbolic reenslavement of oussaint, processes with which the

text opens as the protagonist and his family travel towards incarceration in France on board

the Hros; on the other, it invites more abstract reflection on the travels whereby oussaints

representation has evolved. Te vase encapsulates both the metaphorical journeys according to

which his image has shifted between radically different contexts of production, but also those

other itineraries relating to the literal mobility inherent in the circulation of artefacts.

Te reader imagines this spoil of war returning to France in Cypriens pack, but perhaps

remembers at the same time other images of oussaint disseminated throughout the Atlantic

world that would have an altogether more incendiary impact. Te vase is, however, not the

See Doris Garraway,4. Te Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean(Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 2005).Portraits of oussaint were, for instance, found in the possession of the leader of Cubas 1812 Aponte Rebellion.5.See Matt D. Childs, A Black French General arrived to conquer the Island: Images of the Haitian Revolution in

Cubas 1812 Aponte Rebellion, in Te Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus(Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2001), 137. Te vase also recalls another (if very different) portrait ofLouverture in ceramics, the oussaint pitchers produced in Massachusetts in the 1830s. See Jonathan Prown, Glenn

Adamson, Katherine Hemple Prown and Robert Hunter, Te Very Man for the Hour: the oussaint LOuverturePortrait Pitcher, in Ceramics in America 2002, ed. Robert Hunter (Hanover and London: Chipstone Foundation,2002), 11029.


4/16


only trace of Bells metatextual awareness of the complex processes of representation in which

he is engaged and to which he contributes. Te authors own commentary on his work sug-

gests that any such awareness emerged progressively, and it is in the third and final volume

that evidence of it accumulates: an equestrian portrait of oussaint, perhaps that by Volozan,

presenting its subject according to the iconography of French revolutionary generals (Stone,

646); a Parisian pamphlet, demonizing oussaint as this new Prometheus (Stone, 503). Also,

one of the new characters in Te Stone the Builder Refusedis Pamphile de Lacroix, a general

accompanying Leclerc whose subsequent La Rvolution de Hatiwould figure among the earli-

est accounts of oussaint published in France (of which it remains one of the most balanced).

Tis proliferation of representations of oussaintin different sites, at different moments,

in different media, and with different purposesreflects , even in these few examples drawn

from the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the portability of oussaint as well as

the uneven, often contradictory nature of the representational processes to which he has been

subject.

However, it is not only these historical representations that are evoked, for recent con-

troversies over the interpretation of oussaint are equally inscribed in Bells novels, especially

through paratextual devices (not least in the references to sources of the original letters and

documents with which the second and third volumes conclude). Despite the inspiration of

these sources by the same corpus of speeches, textual fragments, and anecdotes, the reader is

struck by the contradictory versions of oussaint that are implicit in the studies cited. In Bells

footnotes, for instance, Auguste Nemours (the Haitian general and statesman to whom C. L. R

James turned during his visits for Paris in the early 1930s) is juxtaposed with the French diplo-

mat Pierre Pluchon; the formers hagiographic interpretation of an almost messianic oussaint

thus contrasts with the latters critique of oussaint as a counter-revolutionary agent of the

Ancien Rgime(Stone, 73538). Tomas Madious Histoire dHati, a reading of oussaint in

the light of the mulatto legend that characterized the early stages of Haitian historiography,

is placed alongside Victor Schoelchers Vie de oussaint Louverture, which presents its subject

as an abolitionist champion (Master, 71617). Clearly aware of these competing interpreta-

tions, Bell has presented them as a principal motivation in his choice of subject: Tat most

On the iconography of oussaint, see Fritz Daguillard,6. Mystrieux dans la Gloire: oussaint Louverture (17431803)

(Port-au-Prince: MIPANAH, 2003).Pamphile de Lacroix,7. La Rvolution dHati(Paris: Karthala, 1995 [1819]).For a discussion of Pluchons work, see David Geggus,8. Haitian Revolutionary Studies(Bloomington and Indianapo-lis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 4354, and Lucien Ren Abenon, oussaint Louverture vu par lhistorienPierre Pluchon, in La Rvolution franaise et Hati: filiations, ruptures, nouvelles dimensions, ed. Michel Hector, 2 vols(Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1995), I, 27988.


5/16


of the existing readings of oussaints personality contradict each other in very broad terms

also struck me as liberating.

Such a liberating awareness of these paratextual tensions is present in the responses to

events and individuals that constitute the novels themselves. Te whole trilogy may indeed be

read as a reflection on modes of (mis)representation of the past. Te texts third-person narrator

is challenged throughout by Riaus first-person narrative, which brings its own perspective on

oussaints complexity, and there is a constant circulation of textual artefactscorrespondence

and other official missives, proclamations, and not least oussaints own memoirs written at

Jouxthat offer their own competing versions of the unfolding history to whose narration

they contribute. In perhaps the most striking instance of this process, oussaints presenta-

tion of his memoirs to Caffarelli become part of a wider reflection on the ways in which the

truth itself was malleable, ready to change both form and substance as you molded it with

your mind and tongue and pen. (Master, 150) Such a focus on acts of writing complements

Bells much-commented attention to acts of ferocity. Although much of the novel focuses on

individual acts of violence, often presented with an attention to detail deemed (according

to the commentator) clinical or even pornographic, of equal importance are these scenes of

reading and writing. Apart from a few notable instances of violence (such as the killing of the

planter who, having seen him reading, had previously beaten Louverture), oussaint himself is

indeed primarily identifiedthrough dictation, reading or writingwith the pen; as such,

Bell follows the tradition of associating slave literacy (dubbed by Arnaud the sort of practice

that led to rebellion, inMaster, 399) with a radical threat to the established colonial order.

It is writing that provides the continuity between the novels overlapping strands, recounting

respectively oussaints ascent and descent, in Haiti and then at Joux; and it is a tactical mas-

tery of languagemak[ing] words in knots instead of lines, so that they twisted like mating

snakes upon each other and would say more than one thing (All Souls, 275); mak[ing] his

words march in more than one direction (All Souls, 287)that complements and at certain

points eclipses oussaints skills as a military strategist.

Tis emphasis on writing the past and on writing in the past accentuates the historio-

graphic imperative underpinning Bells trilogy. His project is principally one of recoveryor

in rouillots terms, of emitting a piercing scream to counter the silence of the history

books. o illustrate this objective, the novel opens with a letter, dated 15 June 1802, writ-

ten by an unidentified sailor accompanying oussaint Louverture on his journey onboard the

Hrostowards incarceration in France. Te descriptions of the prisoneras Brigand Chief

Madison Smartt Bell, Engaging the Past, in9. Novel History, ed. Mark C. Carnes, 204.rouillot, Bodies and Souls, 19697.10.


6/16


(All Souls, 3) or renegade slave (All Souls, 4)resemble those of contemporary pamphleteers

such as Dubroca, and the authors assumption is that the revolutionary leader will pass into

ignominy as he himself will into anonymity (All Souls, 8). Yet the very existence of the

document, not written with any particular recipient in mind, reflects both its authors curios-

ity at oussaint, a small Negro man, and unremarkable at first glance, more noteworthy for

the incongruity of his dress than for any distinguishing feature of his person (All Souls, 5),

and his clear discomfort at complicity in his fellow officers sneering at the parting words of

this gilded nigger as he left Saint-Domingue: Yet now I hear the words again. . . . What

if they are true? If this man did inspire these last ten years of fire and murdercould he call

up two hundred more? (All Souls, 8) Te almost two thousand pages that follow are a sus-

tained response to this doubt, as Bell engages with the rich selection of accounts of oussaint

produced during the two centuries since his death, and offers his fictional engagement with

these historiographic interpretations.

Given the sensitivity of national foundation myths, it is perhaps surprising that Bells

interpretation of the historiography of oussaints involvement at the beginning of the

revolution has not attracted wider (and more critical) attention. Lon-Franois Hoffmanns

suggestion that the Bois Cayman ceremony (a central event inAll Souls Rising) was more of

a literary construct than a historical event triggered hostile Haitian reactions. Bell places

oussaint in the shadows of this inaugural event (All Souls, 117), but this presence is to be

qualified by the authors description of the future revolutionary leader as an agent provocateur

in the early stages of the revolution. Although Bell does not repeat the now widely accepted

claim that oussaint was, by 1791, a freed slave who had become a slave-owner in his own

right (and whose emancipated status permitted him the social and physical mobility essential

to an emissary in the early stages of the revolution), he claims, in the third chapter ofAll

Souls Rising, that the outbreak of slave violence in 1791 was a calculated, strategic initia-

tive, funded by a group of rich planters (including Bayon de Libertat), in which oussaint

played a key role. Te aim of this conspiracy was to brokerthrough a positing of common

adversityan alliance between the royalist grands blancsand the republican petits blancs,

involving the slave-owning coloured population too. In Sieur Maltrots terms: Let thepom-

pons rougeshave a glimpse of the blackface of freedom and youll see the end of politics. (All

Souls, 51; emphasis in the original)

See Lon-Franois Hoffmann, Un mythe national: la crmonie du Bois-Caman, in11. La Rpublique haitienne: tatsdes lieux et perspectives, ed. Grard Barthlemy and Christian Girault (Paris: ADEC-Karthala, 1993), 43448.See Gabriel Debien, Jean Fouchard, and Marie-Antoinette Menier, oussaint Louverture avant 1789, lgendes et12.ralits, Conjonction: revue franco-haitienne134 (1977): 6580.


7/16


Tis intimation of oussaints complicity in a white planters plot seems neverthe-

less to have done little to undermine a reception the author characterizes as unexpectedly

hospitable. Tis reaction is undoubtedly linked to Bells subtle challenge to historical prec-

edents of this primarily fictional conceit. Ralph Korngold explores the claim of such a plot in

his Citizen oussaint, and Michel-Rolph rouillot traces the dissemination of this conspiracy

theoryfor which he finds no concrete historical evidenceback to claims made during the

trial of Philibert-Franois de Blanchelande, the former governor of Saint-Domingue. In its

historical context, the association of the beginnings of the revolution with a planters plot

served at least two purposes: on the one hand, it suggested the irresponsibility of the grands

blancsin their counter-revolutionary activity; on the other, it might be seen to reflect a con-

temporary inability to grasp that any challenge to the plantation system might be the result

of a then unthinkable black agency.

Bell claims to have incorporated the theory out of a sense of novelistic irony, explain-

ing that the insouciance of the colonists on the brink of the revolution was so extraordinary

that it seemed possible that they might have believed they could start and stop a large-scale

slave insurrection, controlling it for their own political ends. Te author himself goes on

to acknowledge that such involvement was unlikely, but there remains an unanswered and

hypothetical question relating to the motivations underpinning oussaints (fictional) involve-

ment. Was his collusion a strategic decision, taken in the full knowledge that, once triggered,

such a rebellion would not be easily controlled? Or, did he willingly act as an agent of the

planters until events overtook him and he was forced to play another role? Te implication

of Bells narrative is that the former scenario is true. Tis invitation has a catalytic impact: it

forces the planters to play a key role in their own destruction; yet at the same time it permits

oussaint to transform his suppressed, delayed resentment at the pigmentocratic plantation

society of Saint-Domingueexemplified by the green coat he stubbornly insists on wearing,

the bloodstains on which are a lesson in humility (All Souls, 80), a reminder of the beating

meted out to oussaint by a white planter incensed by his ability to readinto the initial

stages of a strategy of emancipation.

Bells convenient devicebacked up, as is stated above, by a variety of (questionable)

historical precedentsis thus central to the version of oussaint he projects across the three

volumes of his trilogy; i.e., as a character who, on the whole, privileges ruse over violence, strat-

egy over chaos. Tere is a need, however, to assess all three novels of the trilogy to appreciate

Bell, Engaging the Past, 199.13.Ralph Korngold,14. Citizen oussaint(London: Victor Gollancz, 1945), 5960; and rouillot, Bodies and Souls,1901.Bell, Engaging the Past, 199200.15.


8/16


the progressive emergence of this version of oussaint. His biography is presented obliquely,

often through reference to the rich cast of characters from a range of social, ethnic, and ideo-

logical backgrounds with whom Bell populates his late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue.

Tat this cast contains positive French and Creole figures suggests the difference between Bells

narratives and many other fictional or otherwise literary accounts of the Haitian Revolution

which rely on Manichean racial divisions that reduce the complexities of the contemporary

colony. Indeed, given the emphasis on this proliferation of additional characters, oussaint

appears to operate inAll Souls Risingas a peripheral figure. He remains central, of course, to

the strand of the narrative recounting his exile and incarceration (although significantly, even

here, is kept apart and under constant surveillance: below deck and monitored through the

ships timbers, in a sealed carriage, in his prison cell), but is presented in the main body of the

text (where his first appearance is hidden by a hedge) in terms that provide little texture to

his status as a fictional recreation. Te leaders of the early stages of the revolutionJeannot,

Jean-Franois and Biassouare privileged, and Bell performs textually, through oussaints

progressive emergence (culminating in the focus on namingand in particular the Proclama-

tion of Camp urelwith which the first volume concludes), the steady rising to which

his title alludes.

By the end of trilogy, however, it becomes clear that oussaint has been central through-

out, like the mitanin a Vodou ceremony (an analogy demonstrated theatrically by Glissant

inMonsieur oussaint), circled by a richly diverse cast of additional characters whose various

dealings and connections with him reveal different and often divergent aspects of his character.

Moreover, their transformations against the backcloth of the revolutionparticularly stark in

the cases of Riau, Flaville and the Arnauds, more subtle in the case of Hbert and Maillart

occur in parallel to the shifts in oussaints own character, illuminating and attenuating those

very shifts. As such, Bell seems to gesture positively in his fictional method towards the revised

historiography of the revolution proposed by scholars such as Caroline Fick, for whom the

overprivileging of oussaint is detrimental to any consideration of the role of the people in

their collective struggle for emancipation and independence. Central among this body of

fighting men is Riau, a pragmatic character, deeply suspicious of those with whom he comes

into contact and the only recurrent first-person narrator in the trilogy. Riaus interventions in

the text permit the reader to track his own transformation from a maroon into an officer in

oussaints army, as well as the development of his political consciousness. At the same time,

they provide a contrapuntal contrast to the voice of the third-person narrator, often recounting

See Caroline E. Fick,16. Te Making of Haiti: the Saint Domingue Revolution from Below(Knoxville: University ofennessee Press, 1990).


9/16


the same events (such as the slave assault on the Arnaud plantation, and Mme Arnauds sev-

ering of her own finger) from an alternative, complementary perspective. Bell describes his

initial malaise, as a white North American novelist, attempting to represent the African-born

former slave and revolutionary, but the convincing character he creates is presented not as a

type but as an individual whose polyvocal subjectivity reflects the divisions and complexities

of the context from which he emerged.

Bell thus exploits the opportunities provided by fictionsuch as the opportunity it grants

him to create Riauto resist the demands of positivist historiography; he is consequently able

to retain, in his portrayal of oussaint himself, a certain degree of opacity. In the light of this,

the complexity of Bells oussainta conservative, even artuffian catholic who is neverthe-

less guided at times by Ogun and collects keepsakes from the dozens ofgrandes blancheswith

whom he has affairs; a brilliant military tactician who still relies on General Yellow Fever

(Stone, 260) in the successful conduct if his campaigns reveals the novelists licence to

maintain antitheses without having to proceed to any neat concluding synthesis. In rouillots

terms: Te literary imagination negotiates distancesocial, spatial, and temporalquite dif-

ferently than academic scholarship. It is this imagination that might be seen as particularly

appropriate in the case of a historical figure committed to fictionalizing (or at least skewing)

public versions of himself, to circulating a tale. (Stone, 49) Bells oussaint is, however,

far from being a relativized, flexible, portable character; he is not presented as what George

yson, Jr. describes, in an anthology that remains one of the most useful collections of textual

representations of oussaint, as all things to all men, from bloodthirsty black savage to the

greatest black man in history.

It is undeniable that the character Bell elaborates over his three volumes shares a series of

characteristics with other fictional or historiographic constructions of the same figure. Bells

oussaint is an abstemious, taciturn figure, requiring little sleep, capable of rapid displacement

and skilled at disguise; his knowledge of medicine is underlined, especially in the early stages

of the revolution, when, at the height of violence, healing properties distinguish him from

his peers and permit the ongoing connection with Hbert. Bell explores oussaints complex

religious belief throughout the novels, in which the character considered to be as old as Legba

(All Souls, 125) is at the same time well-versed in biblical quotations. References to physical

featuresoussaints childhood designation as Fatras-Baton, his marked prognathism, his

Bell, Engaging the Past, 198.17.rouillot, Bodies and Souls, 188.18.Discussing his failure to acknowledge the protagonists freed status, Bell writes: Te best I can say is that oussaints19.subterfuge about his prerevolutionary status worked very well on me. I had been successfully propagandized bysomeone who was, after all, a master of the craft . . . (Engaging the Past, 201).George F. yson, Jr.,20. oussaint Louverture(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), 23.


10/16


wiry jockeys frameare woven into the narrative, as are topoi such as the parable with black

and white beans (Master, 669). Other largely unsubstantiated elements of the oussaint myth

are included in the novelssuch as his sexual dalliance with a series ofgrandes blanches. More-

over, Bell focuses on the key events in oussaints lifemoments of tactical and psychological

intensity, seen in the title of the trilogys second volume as a series of crossroadsthat have

formed the basis of historiographic and fictional explorations of his character. Tese include

the decision to join the revolution; the volte-face(about face) implicit in his shift of allegiance

from the Spanish to the French; the negotiations with the British concerning his future status

(and that of Saint-Domingue); the choice to reinstitute an agrarian policy seen by some as

similar to slavery in all but name (and the execution of Moyse to which this leads); the reunion

with his sons, returned with Leclerc from their education in France; and the response to

Brunets invitation to a meeting, leading to his arrest and kidnap.

Bells oussaint is ultimately presented, however, not according to the reductive set of

iconic types associated with these key characteristics and tropological episodes, but as what

Caffarelli dubs a maze not easily negotiated (Master, 339), an altogether more complex and

contradictory figure in whom traces of these traditionally dichotomized types (monster and

martyr, hypocrite and hero) clash and contrast as they continue to coexist. For Bell, therefore,

his protagonist is not so much the creolized, syncretic, and ultimately unified figure of Glis-

santsMonsieur oussaint, but instead a divided, shape-shifting character who (in his creators

terms) claims a freedom of passage between many very different worlds. As in some of the

other most striking refigurings of oussaintJamess Black Jacobins, or Csaires oussaint

Louverture et la Rvolution Hatienneit is such an imaginative engagement with existing

historiographic underpinnings that permits the work to transcend the coherently documen-

tary histories and biographies that have yet to provide a convincingly objective version of

oussaint.

Te association of Bells trilogy with the work of James and Csaire is a useful one, for it

highlights the novelists speculative reflection on an issue that concerned his rinidadian and

What is also striking and different in Bells work is the consistently detailed account of oussaints career, from21.1791 to his death in 1803, including aspectssuch as his humiliation of British attempts to subdue the revolutionand reimpose slavery, or the progressive destruction of Leclercs forces by yellow feverthat are rarely presentedelsewhere, beyond basic and fleeting details, and that require the novelists imagination to compensate for thehistoriographic silence surrounding them. Michel-Rolph rouillot comments on the comprehensive chronological

knowledge of the revolution that forms part of Bells paratext (better than most such summaries available in Eng-lish), reflecting some of the more recent shifts in understandings of the events in Saint-Domingue (and not least anacknowledgement of the associated roles of Vodou and African warfare in their successful conduct). See rouillot,Bodies and Souls, 184.Bell, Engaging the Past, 20522.In the light of this, it will be illuminating to compare Bells trilogy of novels with his recently published biography,23.oussaint Louverture: A Biography(New York: Pantheon, 2007).


11/16


Martinican predecessors: the motivations behind oussaints apparent willingness to fall into

Brunets trap. For Bell, oussaint deliberately allows himself to be arrested, knowing that his

removal from Saint-Domingue would inevitably trigger the revolutions final stage. o sup-

port this view, Bell invents the scrap of paper found in the knot of oussaints headscarf: You

thought I was deceived by Brunets letter. Fool, I knew what was to come. I knew when you

faced me you faced one leader. When you removed me you would face five hundred thousand.

(Stone, 505) Te result is the integration of oussaints death into the strategic considerations

of his life, and a consequent denial of the traditional compartmentalization of Haiti and Joux.

Bell challenges as a result the tendency to privilege oussaints imprisonment and death, a ten-

dency that leads to his regular romanticization, and is at the same time central to Louvertures

(as opposed to, for instance, Dessaliness) acceptability in the eyes of a North American and

European audience. David Scott has recently reflected on C. L. R Jamess engagement with

oussaints decline, revealing the tensions between a romantic interpretation (that posits the

hope of an eventual postcolonial independence) and a tragic reading (that sees neocolonial

structures of intervention and dependency already encoded in a postcolonial modernity).

Tese are issues to which Bell reacts, not least in the very structure of his trilogy that under-

pins its account of oussaints rising with a parallel awareness of his apparent removal from

power. What then are the implications of Bells opening his textand interspersing its narra-

tive flowwith the ongoing description of oussaints imprisonment and death at Joux? On

the one hand, this juxtaposition reflects the complex layering of the novels narrative strands,

with those (sub)plots that follow the dominant chronological structure (leading from 1791

to 1803) supplemented by an additional and more concentrated narrative (June 1802 to July

1803) unfolding in parallel. On the other, the device permits a disruption of any customary

teleology, with the historical conclusion inscribed throughout the text from its very outset. By

the end of his final volume, as a feverish oussaint witnesses an army of slaves pouring through

the walls of his cell, Bell describes the merging of these distinct spaces, much in the same way

as Glissant stages their theatrical coincidence inMonsieur oussaint: the hard carapace of Joux

was breaking apart at the touch of their blades. (Stone, 694) As the jailer Frantz claims: Te

prisoner has escaped (Stone, 696), the reader is invited to see oussaint as a new Macandal,

adopting a shape-shifting strategy to elude his captors in death.

Te trilogys conclusion encourages a focus on the afterlife that such an escape seems to

prefigure. It accordingly alludes to the persistently key role played by oussaint in any explo-

ration of the dilemmas characterizing post-independence Haiti, a country where, in Nick

See David Scott,24. Conscripts of Modernity: Te ragedy of Colonial Enlightenment(Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press, 2004).


12/16


Nesbitts terms, two of the processes that came to distinguish the twentieth century were

invented . . . : decolonization and neo-colonialism. Bells oussaint, although a contradic-

tory and unfathomable figure, is ultimately presented in a sympathetic and positive light, in

contradistinction to the denigratory tradition inaugurated by Dubroca and perpetuated by

more recent commentators such as Pluchon. Present, oussaint epitomizes the transformation

of enslaved people into autonomous agents; absent, he highlights the persistent imbalance of

power that his own vision of Haiti endeavoured to counter. Te preface to the third volume

describes what Bell sees as the temporary achievement of Louvertures revolutionary vision of

a post-slavery society within some form of francophone commonwealth:

By 1801 he had done much to stabilize the war-ravaged territory and had made real progress in

restoring the economy, inviting the exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return

and manage their properties with free labor. Te foundation of a society based on liberty and

genuine equality and brotherhood among Saint-Domingues three races appeared to be in place.

(Stone, xvii)

Te emphasis here is on the embryonic foundation, embodied in the text by a number ofchildren of mixed ethnicity conceived during the revolution and seeming to exist outside the

social and pigmentocratic structures by which the pre-revolutionary colony was regulated.

Although the civil war between oussaint and Rigaud had ended, interethnic resentment

inevitably persisted, and the return of white planters was associated with a clause in the 1801

constitution that, in Hberts terms, authorizes the importation of slaves (Stone, p.25).

In his interpretation, Bell firmly takes sides in the historiographic and ideological debates

that pit oussaint against Dessalines, contrasting the formers strategic pragmatism with the

violence of the latters push towards final independence. Elsewhere, Bell admires what he sees

in oussaint as a social vision, based on harmonious cooperation among the races, a good

two hundred years ahead of his time. In this, he creates a clear distinction from Dessalines:

whereas oussaint inspires contemporary Haitians with his spirit, the first Emperor has

bequeathed a slogan muttered in desperation: Koup tt, boul kay (Cut off the head,

burn down the house). oussaint thus embodies for Bell a rethinking of social and ethnic

Nick Nesbitt, Te Idea of 1804,25. Yale French Studies107 (July 2005): 6.Tese babies are to be contrasted with others of mixed ethnicityunborn or recently bornwho are the victims of26.infanticide inAll Souls Rising: Claudine Arnaud cuts a foetus from Mouches womb, and the band of slaves descend-

ing on Le Cap are accompanied by a white infant impaled on a spear. rouillot rightly questions the credulityimplicit in Bells repetition of this stereotypical, propagandist image of black violence (Bodies and Souls, 194),but downplays as a result the wider symbolic value of the scene that reflects a democratic movement crushed at anembryonic stage.Bell, Mine of Stones: With and Without the Spirits Along the Cordon de lOuest,27. Harpers Magazine, January2004, 64.Ibid., 66.28.


13/16


divisions, a process of transformation exemplified by Hbert over whom he has a profound

influence. When the doctor, at Crte Pierrot, calls the French blancs, he senses the catalytic

effect of oussaints revolution on his own identity: If he called the Frenchmen blancs, then

what had become himself? (Stone, 488).

Leclercs desire to bury oussaint as deeply as possible in inland France reflects a fearful

awareness of the potential of the Haitian revolutionary to radicalize the Atlantic space along

these lines: He was transfixed by the belief that if oussaint were able to so much as wet

his boot toe in the water of any French port, he would be magically translated back to Saint

Domingue to spread fire and ruin and destruction (All Souls, 127). Central to such a radi-

calization is oussaints pushing of the French and American Revolutions (and the Enlighten-

ment thought underpinning them) to their logical limits, exploringfrom the perspective

of race, and in the context of a burgeoning discourse of droits de lhommewhat it meant to

be human. In an exchange with Jean-Franois, oussaint states his aim as to show the white

people what we are. . . . And also what we are not (All Souls, 209), and the controlled perfor-

mance of black identity his sophisticated tactics inform contributes to the novels underlying

exploration (stated in the context of Choufleurs dissection of his father Maltrot) of what a

man is, in his essence, and who, in the final essence, would be allowed to be one (All Souls,

237; emphasis in the original).

Bells oussaint is accordingly granted the precursory, strategic, even intellectual role

he retains in the Haitian popular imagination, but at the same time maintains a persistent

presence in subsequent history. For Bell, the successful historical novel is not (or is not only)

a mimetic reflection of the past, but also invites the reader to create connections between the

events evoked and the present from which, despite any fictional and paratextual conceits the

author might adopt, they are inevitably narrated. In Mine of Stones, a brief travel narrative

based on a journey along the Cordon de lOuest, Bell reflects on the particular pertinence of

such connections in the Haitian context:

A Vodouisant would say that oussaints spirit was quite near, invisibly present, breathing in the

wind that moved the leaves of Sousonns young trees, exhaled from the pool of souls of the innu-

merable Haitian dead, that great reservoir of spirit energy: Les Morts et les Mystres. Here in the

north of Haiti, time seemed to collapse; the two hundred years that had passed since the death of

oussaint were summoned into the presence of the spiraling leaves.

In describing the American intervasion of Haiti in 1994 and the restoration of presidential

power it permitted, Bell goes on to evoke the spectral presence of oussaint, like a wise elder

For a key discussion between Maillart and Lacroix on the denial of humanity, see29. Stone, 4389.Bell, Mine of Stones, 57.30.


14/16


at Aristides shoulderthere to complete the mission of liberation that had been frustrated

back in 1802. Published a month before the presidents removal from power, Bells article

foresees the signs of this imminent change and situates it within a wider historical process:

It had long seemed plausible to me that the spirit of oussaint Louverture walked with Aristide,

at least for part of the road he had taken, but why then was there such frustration now? . . . ous-

saint was undone by foreign powers, and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outsideinterference; maybe he too was destined to be a Precursor, oussaints title in the pantheon of

Haitian heroes.

Aristide himself had exploited oussaints symbolic capital in the Haitian politico-cultural

imaginary, selecting for instance celebrations of the bicentenary of his death to demand repa-

rations from France and echoing key phrases of Louvertures (most notably in his first speech

in exile, made on the tarmac at Bangui airport in February 2004). It is with such a sense of

historical short-circuitingor, to borrow Bells own terminology, temporal collapsethat the

trilogy (pointedly dedicated to les Morts et les Mystres) concludes. It might even be argued

that the pan-Caribbean resonance of the Haitian Revolution is implicit throughout the text,not least in paratextual material such as the chapter epigraphs from Bob Marley, contrasting

with the texts subject matter but at the same time evoking connections (in the terms of C .L.

R. James, in his 1963 appendix to Te Black Jacobins), from oussaint LOuverture to Fidel

Castro (and beyond).

Te radical and resonating impact of oussaint is crystallized in the dense concluding

section ofAll Souls Rising, where the narrator describes:

the fire that started in Le Cap . . . still rendering and dividing, so that everyone must be compelled

to admire how whitely the flames rise in their pallor above the black charcoal, though the firelight

has such a terrible time to travel through, like the light of a long-dead star, emerging from a historyso remote and distant it seems almost quaint (All Souls, 504).

An indication of Bells understanding of the nature of this travel is to be found in Riaus

concluding remarks, dated 1825, by which time the divisive struggle between black and

mulatto Haitians had reached a temporary pause. Petion had been installed as president of a

reunited Haiti, Riau himself had withdrawn from society to become a houngan (male high

priest of Vodou) and Haiti had reached a new stage in its independence, agreeing to pay to

former French slave owners the reparations that would hamper its development for the next

century or more. Riaus list of many who have gone beneath the water or will go associates

oussaint with one of the most recent victims of violent politics in Haiti, the journalist at

Ibid., 60.31.Ibid., 64.32.


15/16


Radio Hati Inter, Jean Dominique. It thus forges links between the past and present, much

in the same way as Edouard Duval-Carris paintings for the bicentenary of independence (in

which oussaint and Dominique play similarly key roles). Riaus list serves a dual purpose.

By relativizing oussaint in a historical catalogue of Haitian victims of factionalism and

oppression, Bell endeavours to avoid the risks of hagiography. At the same time, however, by

creating an historical continuum, the list links the precursors of the revolution with the sub-

sequent victimsduring the first US occupation under the Duvaliers, during the resistance to

Aristides rise to powerof its continued incompletion.


16/16

Reproducedwithpermissionof thecopyrightowner. Further reproductionprohibitedwithoutpermission.

Forsdick on Smartt Bell

Documents

Transcript of Forsdick on Smartt Bell