Haiti’s History — and Ours

Vital Voices

Haitian slaves once rebelled against their masters,
and their revolution had a significant impact on
the United States. Yet this part of Haitian history
is rarely told in today’s America.

By LaNitra Walker

<http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures...>

Like many people these days, I have Haiti on my mind.
Harrowing images of Haitians running through the streets
of Cap-Haitien or Port-au-Prince are shown on the news.
And now President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has resigned,
and Haitians are faced with looting and violence.

But there is more to Haiti than just the sharp sounds of
gunfire on the evening news. The country’s historical
accomplishments are rich and varied, and we should
celebrate them as if they were their our own — because,
in fact, some of them are.

Haiti and the United States are both postcolonial
nations that resisted the tyranny of their sovereign
rulers and developed into nations in the name of freedom
and self-determination. By examining the Haitian
revolution, which took place from 1791 to 1804, more
closely, Americans will have a better understanding of
how their own nation was formed.

Did you know, for example, that the United States’
purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 was a direct
result of the Haitian revolution? When I say this to
friends and acquaintances, I usually get one of two
reactions: skepticism (followed by an uncomfortable
silence) or, "Gee, I never knew that. Um, did I mention
that my 8-year-old son just learned how to ride a
unicycle?" In other words, anything to change the
subject.

Nothing against unicycles (or 8-year-olds), but the
reaction of the people I know raises a question that
should be as much a concern as Haiti’s political unrest:
Why is a country that lies only 700 miles from our shore
so far off of America’s historical radar screen?

Admittedly, and despite the fact that American history
was my favorite subject in school, I only learned about
the impact of the Haitian revolution a few years ago. As
a teenager, I studied my textbooks carefully, learning
important dates, major battles, and foreign-policy
doctrines. And as I learned about our history, I felt
privileged, as an African American, to be a cultural
insider to aspects of the black experience in this
country. (Some of my older relatives attended segregated
black schools in the South and suffered racial
discrimination, so I heard firsthand accounts of what
had happened in the past.)

In 2001, I was studying art history (I was at Duke at
this time and read Trouillot in a graduate history
seminar) and international relations at Stanford
University when a professor suggested that I read
Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s book Silencing the Past: Power
and the Production of History. Trouillot describes how
the Haitian revolution has been "silenced" in American
history. As he explains, power differentials between
those who write history and those who make it determine
which historical events are recorded and which are
ignored, or "silenced."

Before the Haitian revolution occurred, scholars did not
believe that slaves could successfully revolt against
their masters, and therefore did not factor the idea
into their theorizations of history or their choices
when preserving archival material. Because there was no
vocabulary for explaining events that altered
traditional power relationships (such as the
relationship between the master and his (or her)
slaves), they were either oversimplified or left out of
history altogether. While reading Trouillot’s book, I
was shocked to discover that such an important period in
the development of the Western Hemisphere could be
downplayed, or eliminated entirely, from history
textbooks. I was also dismayed to find out that I, too,
had been a victim of this historical conspiracy —
despite the fact that I considered myself well-versed in
both the good and bad parts of America’s past. Since
then, I’ve been determined to learn more about Haiti,
and its relationship to the United States.

Both countries began as colonies, generating enormous
agricultural wealth based on slave labor. When the
slaves of San Domingue rose up against Haiti’s elite in
1791, plantation owners in the American South took
notice. They were afraid that they, too, would meet the
same fate at the hands of their slaves. The
establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804 served as
a direct threat to slavery in America, proving that
blacks were capable of staging successful rebellion.
American plantation owners attempted to prevent their
slaves from learning about the revolution in Haiti. The
news spread quickly, though, confirming for many slaves
that their days in bondage were numbered. It was a
milestone for African Americans — for all Americans,
really.

Yet even today, discussions about black revolutionary
potential are taboo in certain social circles. Last
week, for example, during a casual dinner conversation
in Durham, North Carolina, about my research, several
people expressed their surprise — and some their
skepticism — when I described the revolution’s impact
on the United States. This is partly why I’ve launched a
one-person crusade to educate people about the Haitian
revolution.

Some more facts: Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was the
U.S. minister to Haiti from 1889-91. And the Works
Progress Administration (WPA) commissioned a special
project in the 1930s to document the Haitian
revolution’s impact on New York City during that time.
Yet these incidents are almost always left out of
textbooks. Students may learn about Douglass while
studying the Civil War (or during those "Great Moments
in Black History" commercials that appear on TV every
February), but chances are that the subject of Haiti
will never come up during discussions of the New Deal or
the WPA.

It’s a shame. Haiti has a rich cultural history that
became intertwined with United States history,
specifically during the longest US occupation that ended
in 1934. For example, playwright Eugene O’Neill wrote
the 1920 play, The Emperor Jones after traveling
throughout Central America and reading accounts about
Toussaint L’ouverture and the Haitian Revolution. The
play, which recounted the story of an escaped African
American convict named Brutus Jones who becomes the
emperor of a Caribbean island, was extremely popular for
white and black audiences throughout the United States.
And in 1934, marine Captain John Houston Craig wrote a
memoir about Haiti entitled, Black Bagdad, in which he
described some of the marines’ experiences with Haitians
while occupying the island. In addition, Zora Neale
Hurston completed an anthropological study of Haitian
religion (Vodun, often referred to as Voodoo) in 1938
entitled, Tell My Horse.

For an 1930s artistic perspective on the Haitian
Revolution, Take a look at Jacob Lawrence’s The Life of
Toussaint L’ouverture series, which is located at Tulane
University’s Amistad Research Center in New Orleans.
(Sadly, the series is no longer on view, and you can’t
see it in its entirety, even online. But you can take
see reproductions of Lawrence’s work in "Over the Line:
The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence," which was published
by University of Washington Press.) - When you look at
the images, your attention is drawn to a portrait of
General Toussaint L’ouverture, one of several leaders of
the Haitian revolution. Shown against a dark-green
background, Toussaint’s focused gaze is striking.
Lawrence painted the series in 1938 at the age of 21.
Throughout the series, he describes Toussaint’s
development from slave to general through education and
diplomacy. By the time we see Toussaint’s portrait in
panel number 20, he has evolved into a confident and
successful leader, which is supported by his numerous
military victories in the previous panels.

In several interviews, Lawrence has mentioned his desire
to portray the parallels between the physical pain of
slavery in Haiti and the mental anguish and financial
destitution created by racial discrimination in America.
"We don’t have a physical slavery," he states, "but an
economic slavery. If these [Haitian slaves], who were so
much worse off than the people today, could conquer
their slavery, we can certainly do the same thing."

On February 24, the United States sent Marines to secure
the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince. And President Bush
recently said that the U.S. Coast Guard will send
fleeing Haitians back into their political inferno. With
such pronouncements, it’s all the more reason for Haiti
not to be sent back to the recesses of American minds.

— -

LaNitra Walker is a doctoral candidate in art history at
Duke University.

For more information on the U.S. occupation of Haiti,
see Mary A. Renda’s book, Taking Haiti: Military
Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism
1915-1940, published by the University of Chapel Hill
Press.