Abstract
By paying more attention to performances rather than readings of Vastey, in this chapter the author asks what understandings of Haitian independence, Haitian sovereignty, and the Black Atlantic humanism that both buttressed, we might glean by thinking about how Vastey, an intellectual, became a central figure in dramatic representations of Haitian revolutionaries by twentieth-century writers? Daut probes this question by first exploring in the twentieth-century theater of Haitian independence the meaning and consequences of isolating and blaming Haiti for the troubles with black sovereignty (in Sect. 1). This thread is then pursued more specifically by examining how Haiti has been isolated from modern Black Atlantic thought, as demonstrated by theatrical representations of Vastey produced by Derek Walcott (in Sect. 2), Aimé Césaire (in Sect. 3), and May Miller, Selden Rodman, and Dan Hammerman (in Sect. 4). Daut argues that what we derive from these six performances of Vastey on stage is a pointed critique of Haitian leadership and ultimately, Haitian sovereignty; one that tends to isolate rather than include Haiti in a history of the Americas marked by both neo-colonialism and global capitalism. In their own ways the authors of these plays use Vastey to produce a performance of the troubles with sovereignty after colonialism.
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Notes
- 1.
Respectively, Christophe’s Daughters (1935); The Revolutionists (1942) and Henri Christophe, Man for Freedom: An Historical Drama (1945).
- 2.
I operate from a definition of neocolonialism that is derived, in part, from Kwame Nkrumah’s “Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism” (1965), wherein Nkrumah explains, “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State […] is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”
- 3.
For the purposes of this essay, I make no fine distinction between dramas about the Haitian Revolution, proper, and dramas about the first two decades of Haitian independence. Most of the plays under consideration here merge these separate eras together. In fact, Corbould tells us that the vast majority of early twentieth-century plays about Haiti concern the Revolution and the regimes of Christophe and Dessalines. She writes, “Stage writers of the interwar years all but ignored the period of Haitian history from about 1820 to the 1920s and 1930s” (260).
- 4.
Two notable exceptions to the “great man” narrative in twentieth century dramas about the Haitian Revolution occur in May Miller’s Christophe’s Daughters, which focuses on the monarch’s two daughters, Améthiste and Athénaire, and features Vastey as a character, and Helen Webb Harris’s Génifrède (1922), a play about Louverture’s eponymous fictional daughter, which was likely inspired by Harriet Martineau’s The Hour and the Man (1841). Martineau’s play also gives Louverture a fictional daughter named Génifrède. Both Harris and Miller’s plays were published as a part of a 1935 anthology, edited by Miller and Richard Willis , entitled, Negro History in Thirteen Plays (1935). Miller authored four of the plays in the anthology herself, including Christophe’s Daughters. Miller’s other plays were, Harriet Tubman; Samory; and Sojourner Truth. For more on Miller, see, Perkins (14).
- 5.
Philip Kaisary sees these kind of radical representations of the Haitian Revolution that might be in service of conservative arguments about Haitian sovereignty as endemic to twentieth-century literary representations of Haitian independence. He writes that “narrating ‘through the people’ does not necessarily give rise to a radical discourse, just as narrating through great individuals can be considered elitist, but not necessarily conservative” (138). Kaisary’s example is Walcott’s The Haitian Earth, which Kaisary views as celebrating the people of Haiti, mostly living in the rural countryside, over the leaders of Haiti, presented as big city politicians. Kaisary writes that “The Haitian Earth strives to make the Haitian people the play’s major subjects” (151), and in so doing, it “sets up between the country and the city” a “binary” familiar to anyone in Haitian Studies: “the countryside and a rural way of life is presented as being authentically Haitian, whereas the city is associated with vice and the colonists” (154).
- 6.
For an expanding bibliography of nineteenth-century fictions of the Haitian Revolution, see http://www.haitianrevolutionaryfictions.com.
- 7.
Vastey wrote in an 1819 letter to Thomas Clarkson that he had served under Toussaint Louverture at the age of fifteen (rpt. in Griggs 181–82). Vastey’s claim is in some senses confirmed by the future baron’s own father. Jean-Valentin Vastey , the future Baron de Vastey’s father, wrote to his nephew back in France circa 1798, “we are being harassed a lot about joining the service. Especially, your cousin [Jean-Louis Vastey] charged with paying taxes for the corvée” (qtd. in Quevilly 223). According to an additional letter written by Vastey’s father on 9 Feburary 1801, the future baron had indeed eventually been forced into conscription, fighting against “les noirs:” “We are doing well, thank God,” the elder Vastey wrote, “There is only your youngest cousin who has been been officially drafted and won his first campaign at the price of a serious illness. We were very worried for quite some time that he would not live” (qtd. in Quevilly 227). Vastey was apparently wounded by a gunshot in the course of “fighting the insurgents” in October 1802. Vastey’s cousin, Michel, who was also living in Saint-Domingue wrote home to say that his cousin “was almost killed yet again. He has escaped a thousand times from death. He received a bullet in the leg about a month ago. He remains in pain” (qtd. 246). For more on this, see Chap. 2 of the present volume.
- 8.
While Miller’s play represents the first drama in which Vastey appears as a character, the first novel to feature the baron appears to be Bruce Graeme’s Drums of Destiny (1947).
- 9.
See also, my article, “The ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian Literature” (2016).
- 10.
Cook authored several works published in Haiti while he continued to live in the country, including a Handbook for Haitian Teachers of English (1944); and The Haitian American Anthology: Haitian Readings from American Authors (1944) (Lubin, In Memoriam, 157).
- 11.
Hill tells us that “[f]rom the year 1893, when the black playwright William Edgar Easton wrote his drama, Dessalines, through Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe published in 1963, to Derek Walcott’s The Haitian Earth produced in St. Lucia in 1984, over a dozen black dramatists have turned out plays dealing with aspects of the revolution” (414). See also Corbauld (281, ftn2).
- 12.
While it seems obvious after reading the plays that many black writers were critical of sovereign Haiti’s first leaders in their attempts to dramatize the events, it is worth thinking about whether or not the viewers, spectators, and readers of these plays necessarily shared the sentiment that Haiti’s leaders were ultimately tragic. Corbould, for example, has written that in the early twentieth-century theater of the Haitian Revolution, “the characters’ faults were not fatal to their fans, just as Brutus Jones [from Eugene O’Neills’s famous play, The Emperor Jones] had been warmly received in the early 1920s” (280).
- 13.
Among Lamming’s most well-known works are a novel entitled, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), and a collection of essays called, The Pleasures of Exile (1960).
- 14.
According to Nicholls, in historical writings that fall prey to “the mulatto legend of history,” “Dessalines is portrayed as despotic, barbarous, and ignorant; Christophe was also despotic and prejudiced against the coloureds. Pétion, on the other hand, was everything that is virtuous: liberal, humane, democratic, mild, civilized, honest, as was Boyer , his lineal successor” (From Dessalines 91).
- 15.
According to Kaisary, “the 1936 play was published and performed as both Emperor of Haiti and Troubled Island, sketches for which were written during Hughes’s six-month stay in Haiti in 1931, and the libretto for the opera Troubled Island, which was based on the earlier play and was nearly ready for performance by 1938” (39). The play premiered at the Karamu Theater in in New York City in November of 1936, where it was only performed eight times (Kaisary 43).
- 16.
Césaire’s note reads that a “griffe” is a “Variété de métis haïtien” or “variety of Haitian of mixed-ancestry” (150). The term is a part of a larger compendium of pseudo-scientific terms used in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries as a part of racial taxonomies (see, Daut, Tropics 89).
- 17.
Leyburn’s The Haitian People (1941) is the only other text cited by Rodman to even mention Vastey, and Vastey appears in this work only as a source without any other descriptive or biographical information (22, 254, 326).
- 18.
Césaire likely arrived at this particular ironic statement from his familiarity with the writing of Victor Schoelcher who wrote in his Colonies étrangères et Haïti (1843), “having learned that [French] people were making fun of his princes of Marmelade and his dukes of Limonade (two districts of the island that he had made into fiefs), Christophe slyly said that he could completely understand how such a thing could cause laughter among those who had their own Prince de Poix (prince of Peas) and Duc de Bouillon (duke of Bouillon)” (2:151).
- 19.
In Réflexions politiques Vastey, who was intimately involved in the Franco de Médina affair, wrote that the French spy had not been executed by Christophe’s government: “Franco Médina is still alive. For more than four years we have been keeping this spy as living proof of [Pétion’s] loyalty to the French cabinet” (145). According to Jean Brière, Laffont de Labédat’s 1815 account affirms Vastey’s own (for more on this affair, see, Brière 68). Quevilly has read Vastey’s assurance that Franco de Médina was still alive as sarcastic, citing Ardouin’s claim that the French spy died in the royal prison (see, Quevilly 288; Ardouin, Études 8:112).
- 20.
These kinds of situations actually did occur, but with less dramatic effect. Vastey, for instance, used an article that was written in the Gazette Royale d’Hayti, the official publication of Henry Christophe’s kingdom, to express his disdain over the actions of a U.S. American merchant ship from New York named the Sidney Crispin, under the captainship of Elesha Kenn. Vastey reprinted the article in his Essai, which stated that on October 17, 1816 Crispin, along with his crew, brought a letter from two French warships hovering off the coast of Cap-Henry to the Count of Marmelade, seeking to open negotiations with Christophe. Because the letter did not recognize the sovereignty of Christophe, addressing him as General Christophe rather than King Christophe, the Count naturally refused to transmit the letter (Vastey, Essai, 351–356).
- 21.
A detailed account of this actual mass is given in the official newspaper of the kingdom of Haiti, La Gazette royale, dated 20 November 1814. The Gazette reveals that after being briefed on the interrogation of Franco de Médina, Christophe, who was away from Sans Souci at the time of Franco de Médina’s capture, “gave immediate orders that all the authorities of the kingdom should return to the capital in order to attend a Te Deum that would be sung to the All Mighty in order to praise the fact that he permitted us to discover and bring to light the criminal intentions of our implacable enemies” (1). This Te Deum, however, was apparently not a “messe de requiem” for Franco de Médina, as portrayed in Césaire’s play. Instead, “the nave and the choir were hung for mourning, in allusion to the famous punishment of the execrable Donatien Rochambeau’s […] grand ball in Port-au-Prince […]; this monster had all the rooms done up for mourning, and he announced to the women that they were going to attend the funerals of their husbands and their family members” (2). “Agoustine Franco, called Médina,” the article continues, was at this church service ordered by Christophe and “was displayed before the people, standing on a dock, his back leaning against a column.” The account finishes by noting that Christophe’s court and military simply scared practically to death the French spy: “Agoustine Franco could barely stand up on his legs; he staggered; he could not breathe; he prayed and consecrated his soul to all the Saints of heaven. The holiness of the place, the august aspect […] the sight of this brilliant and numerous court, the crowd of richly decorated warriors that he had had the audacity to suspect of base infamy, in believing that they were capable of renouncing their rights, all of these circumstances together, assaulted the physical and moral faculties of Franco; he succumbed and fell to his knees when he heard the thunderous speech of M. le baron de Vastey : ‘Friends! With these names of Slave and Master, nothing can stop the wrath that inflames you; the bell of freedom has sounded! ….Run to your weapons, to fire, to carnage, and to vengeance!’ Hearing this appeal, Franco, imagining that thousands of bayonets were pointed at his chest, was seized with fear, he was not well; we were obliged to bring him some vinegar and a cordial in order to revive him after this necessary terror” (2). For more on this mass, see Vastey’s Essai (217).
- 22.
Jérôme-Maximilien Borgella was a general in the Haitian army who fought in the war of independence. After the death of André Rigaud in 1811, he commanded the southwestern part of Haiti until joining with Pétion in 1812.
- 23.
Ourika (1823) is a novel written by Claire de Duras about a black female child forcibly taken from Senegal to France to live with a white family. As Ourika ages, she comes to realize that the people in her social circle view her as ugly and unworthy because of her dark skin. When she falls in love with her adopted “mother’s” son, but discovers that her love for him can never be reciprocated because of her skin color, she becomes despondent and ends up dying alone in a convent from despair.
- 24.
Both Miller and Césaire may have derived their portrayals of Vastey carrying the burden of Christophe’s body from Vandercook who wrote that after the King’s death, “the Queen, the two Princesses, and little fierce old Vastey left Sans Souci by a secret door and started up the long, dark trail that leads to Henry’s Citadel. The dead King was a heavy load; double heavy for one old man, an old Negress, and two young girls, all heartbroken” (120).
- 25.
Miller likely derived this portrayal from Vandercook’s Black Majesty, where Christophe tells the character Duncan, “To be great […] is to be lonely. To be magnificent is to have men hate you” (118).
- 26.
Lhérisson had also served as Alain Locke’s translator during the latter’s stint as a Cultural Ambassador to Haiti from April 9-July 10, 1843 (Buck 181).
- 27.
The American Negro Theater was created in New York City in 1940 by Abram Hill and Frederick O’Neal, two actors from Harlem. The ANT was a part of the Federal Theatre Project begun in Harlem and was most active from 1940–1955.
- 28.
The play is held by Rare Manuscript Division at the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library.
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Daut, M.L. (2017). Baron de Vastey and the Twentieth-Century Theater of Haitian Independence. In: Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47067-6_5
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