The Revolution and The Earthquake

I am, ostensibly, an aspiring historian of the Haitian Revolution. So what does the Revolution have to do with the earthquake? Depending on who you ask, God killed those people, or the government killed those people, but often both potential C.O.D.s are located in a larger narrative of Haiti. For many Protestants, God punished Haiti for a whole slew of sins which are rooted in the (mythical?) origins of the Haitian Revolution, the Bois Cayman ceremony. It's not just Pat Robertson that says this kind of stuff, but at least Haitians get the facts right. Weeks before the uprising of August 1791, a group of slave leaders met at Bois Cayman, sacrificed a pig and drank its blood, and basically pledged themselves to the devil (or Vodou gods) if he would help them leave slavery and expel the white people. For many, this is Haitian original sin: of course a country that was founded with Satan's help would only end up badly! In my interviews this is brought up fairly often as a reason for the earthquake, but I must stress that it's usually in conversations with particularly religious Protestants. So was it a cleansing? Getting rid of those who are particularly stained by evil? Or was it violent message to those who lived to repent repent repent? Either way, God finally got around to punishing Haiti about 220 year later for achieving freedom from slavery through violence. (The follow up question to this is: Do you think the slaves of Saint-Domingue should have consented to stay in slavery? Often the answer is yes. I mean, look at Guadeloupe! they say. Sure they got reenslaved, but they're a French department and we're dirt poor. Would forty more years of slavery really hurt that much? Aime Cesaire came to a similar conclusion near the end of his career: Sure the Haitian fought a glorious revolution against a system of profound oppression, but what did they do with their freedom? Not much.)


The Haitian Revolution is also invoked to explain the sorry state of Haitian politics. And in light of the earthquake, the criminal neglect of the Haitian state is cast in the limelight. Sometimes their neglect held up as a reason so many people died in the quake and the days after. One of Haiti's greatest problems is a state that is either predatory or absent. Power is more interested in maintaining itself than doing anything with the power (I guess that's not that particular to Haiti, but its consequences are more devastating here) and this goes way way back. During the course of the Revolution and in its immediate consolidation, rather than allying, the leaders successively stabbed each other in the back until there was only one man left standing. Dessaline himself had a hand in the fall of Toussaint Louverture, then Dessaline was murdered by Petion and Christophe, who then split the country in two, until they were both dead (natural death and suicide) and the country was finally unified by Boyer in 1820. The founding fathers of Haiti pioneered the dog-eat-dog Haitian political tradition and blatant profiteering that has defined the Haitian state since. I try to ask about how this mentality has been perpetuated across the generations, but I have yet to find an answer. But many people know that their current disillusionment has deep deep roots, and use history to explain the rubble and the death. So much for the Tree of Liberty?

Part of me revolts against these mentalities, the part of me that believes the Haitian Revolution was something spectacular for all of humanity, in the Laurent Dubois-Susan Buck Morss sense. But it's true that the Haitian Revolution is only spectacular if you disconnect it from everything that came after. The enslaved overthrowing racial oppression is and establishing their own state is a magnificent moment, but it takes a certain fetishization of 'equality' and 'democracy' and 'racial equality' to let the story end there. I mean, racism never left Haiti. Democracy has never truely been implemented here (I'm not saying that I think it exists elsewhere...). Equality? Maybe in Haiti everyone is 'black' but there is no economic equality, social equality, political equality. On an intellectual or humanitarian level the Haitian Revolution is covered in glory, but as soon as you try to tie it to material success, it stops shining so much.