Taking a closer look at the Haitian Revolution

Title: Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804-2002

Editors: Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw

Publishers: University of the West Indies Press, Mona, Jamaica, 2008

Reviewed by: Billy Hall

The timeliness of this book is highly significant for two major reasons. One is that it has come about in the context of analysing the bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution of 2004, and two is that it comes up for review when Haiti is very much in the news because of the disastrous earthquake in January.

This book brings together both those events tied by a common concern - reparations due Haiti. The reparations claims are enormous, but are they justified?

This book is a sequel to an earlier work, Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks, a collection of essays edited by the same authors, Martin Munro, associate professor of French and Francophone literature at Florida State University, and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, lecturer in Francophone Caribbean literature at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus, Trinidad & Tobago.

The 11 essays in this collection are characterised by the authors in the book's blurb on the back cover as developing and complementing the previous collection to meet the growing demand for original scholarly work on Haiti. However, the authors further explain that this volume widens the cultural lens to include diasporic studies, art and questions of race and gender.

Nevertheless, it is the opening essay that is most striking, and it is historical and political as well as analytical and penetratingly provocative. The contributor is Edward Baptist, a lecturer in the Department of History at Cornell University, New York.

The intriguing title of his essay is Hidden in Plain View, with the subtitle - Evasion, Invasions, and Invisible Nations. He begins his essay with the perceptive, enigmatic comment: "Nothing is so invisible as that which is hidden in plain view."

His contention is that grave injustice has been done to Haiti by the USA and France, and he traces historically and exposes analytically that reality, which nevertheless remains, he maintains, until today, hidden in plain view.

Baptist focuses on the significance of the 1803 purchase of the vast Louisiana land area effected by Thomas Jefferson's delegates. He argues that "when Haiti won its independence against all odds, white authors and politicians attempted to erase the entire nation. They excluded it from the community of international relations, bullied it into paying reparations to France, and continually pretended that the anomaly either did not exist or was on the verge of imminent collapse".

Denying white defeat

He refers to Michael Dash who exposes this myopic development in his book, Haiti and the United States, making the point that from the perspective of white detractors, Haiti was "a failed nation comprised of people who could not, after all, change the course of history".

Baptist points out that after the Haitian Revolution occurred, white historians tried to do "what white arms could not do", which he said was the "wiping of the Haitian Revolution off the mind's map of the past" adding shockingly, "Denying white defeat, they ignored casualties and losses that, for France and Britain, exceeded those of Waterloo".

He quotes Henry Adams. "The prejudices of race alone blinded the American people to the debt they owed to the desperate courage of five hundred thousand Haitian negroes who would not be enslaved" (History of the United States in the Administration of Jefferson and Madison, NY, Scribner, 1899-911: 2, 20-21).

Issues of race and debt arise again, caused by the January earthquake that has wreaked the worst natural disaster in this part of the world for centuries, leaving Haiti in destitution and in need of massive financial and material assistance. In this regard, Baptist in one of his endnotes makes mention of his calculations about that US debt to Haiti, worth quoting, even trumpeting.

The 192 pages of this book constitute a scholarly work. The articles are well researched, persuasively argued and perceptively descriptive. The academic documentation is satisfactory, and essays wide-ranging enough to satisfy the discriminating in regard to literary and historical works.

The artwork is not as self-explanatory as the publishers may imagine and, on the whole, is a dull gray to black. Also, photographs of the contributors would have enhanced their brief profiles.

His contention is that grave injustice has been done to Haiti by the USA and France, and he traces historically and exposes analytically that reality, which nevertheless remains, he maintains, until today, hidden in plain view.