Abstract
This chapter suggests that the language used by John Beverley to describe testimonio as a form of protest against the violence of modernity, “a revulsion for fiction and for the fictive as such,” can be useful to us in understanding early Haitian prose works and their seeming refusal to adopt or conform to established anti-slavery literary forms, such as the abolitionist novel and the Anglophone slave narrative. Rather than simply being coeval with the sentimental and gothic literary traditions of the Atlantic World in which he lived, Vastey’s brutal account of slave punishments and tortures in Le Système emerges as a hard to define text that is both a state-sanctioned version of Haitian colonial history and a methodologically novel use of collective slave memory to create a “history from below.”
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Notes
- 1.
See the work of Sean Goudie (2006), Monique Alleweart (2013), James Alexander Dun (2016), Christopher Iannini (2012), Matthew Clavin (2009) , Ashli White (2010), for instance.
- 2.
For southerners, see Sidbury, “Saint Domingue in Virginia,” 539–541; Hunt , Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America, 101; Sheller , “The Haytian Fear,” 287; and White, “Limits of Fear,” 363. For northern abolitionists, see Sheller, “The Haytian Fear,” 286; and Clavin, Toussaint Louverture, 118. For African Americans, see Fanning, “Roots of Early Black Nationalism,” 63; and Dixon , African America and Haiti, 8.
- 3.
There has been a lot of debate in recent years over whether or not testimonio is, in fact, anti-literary by people like Linda Brooks and David Stoll , but it is not necessary to enter into that debate here. Instead, we might more fruitfully ask if testimonio provides a solution to the incapacity of Western discourse (and really any discourse at all) to provide an adequate vocabulary for traumatic events. If we read testimonio instead, like Stoll and Brooks, as simply one of many kinds of (now canonized) fiction, are we doing violence to a form of writing that cannot be understood using established literary genres? When we try to classify these works in relation to existing genres, what might we be missing?
- 4.
For this particular enslaver as Vastey’s grandfather see page 29 of the present volume. Vastey’s father, Jean Valentin Vastey, was an admittedly cruel enslaver, and Vastey may have witnessed his father’s own torture of slaves firsthand. The elder Vastey wrote to his brother back in France on 10 December 1773 that he had purchased his first two slaves and that, “These slaves cost us a lot. 3000 pounds a piece! But they make our fortune with their labor. We ride them like horses with great clacks of the whip” (qtd in Quevilly 73). In the Noms de Lieux d’époque coloniale en Haiti of J.B. Romain, we learn that Pierre Dumas, who was originally from Bordeaux, also had a plantation in Fort-Liberté (74).
- 5.
See Niles’ Weekly Register, Supplement to Vol. 8 (March–October 1815), 172. The author of the original article clearly believed that the de Cockburnes who were famous for their cruelty in Saint-Domingue were the same de Cockburnes then living in Baltimore and “lately rendered illustrious by feats of arms on our shores.” “The similarity of the two namesakes,” the author notes sardonically, “removes all doubt of the relationship subsisting between them, and we shall make the extract [from Vastey] with the simple remark, that in few families are there two such worthy characters.”
- 6.
The idea that the “proverbial” phrase “heureux comme un nègre de Gallifet” was a testament to the kindness of enslavers, appears to have originated in the abolitionist Benjamin Frossard’s two-volume La Cause des esclaves nègres et des habitans de la Guinée portée au Tribunal de la Justice, de la Réligion, de la Politique ou Histoire de la Traite & de l’Esclavage des Nègres, Preuves de leur illégitimité, Moyens de les abolir sans nuire ni aux Colonies ni aux Colons (1789, 2: 332). Yet the phrase was almost certainly made popular by Bryan Edwards in his widely referenced An Historical Survey of the French Colony of St. Domingo (1797), later published as a part of the 1801 edition of his The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies. Edwards writes, “The largest sugar plantation on the plain was that of Mons. Gallifet, situated about eight miles from the town, the negroes belonging to which had always been treated with such kindness and liberality, and possessed so many advantages, that it became a proverbial expression among the lower white people, in speaking of any man’s good fortune to say il est heureux comme un nègre de Gallifet (he is as happy as one of Gallifet’s negroes)” (3: 74). The influence of Edwards’s analysis of the phrase (whether contested by abolitionists who refuted its meaning or affirmed by those who accepted Edwards’s rendering) is quite obvious, for example, in Marcus Rainsfords’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805, p. 135); Georgette Ducrest’s 1829 Mémoires sur l’impératrice Joséphine, ses contemporains, la cour de Navarre et de Malmaison (3: 188); John Glassford Hopkirk’s An Account of the Insurrection in St. Domingo, Begun in August 1791 (1833, p. 17); Henry Peter Brougham’s Albert Lunel; or, The château of Languedoc (1844); Theodore Edward Hook’s Precepts and Practice (1857); and in his pro-slavery Appeal to Commonsense and the Patriotism of the People of the United States (1860), Louis Schade fully evoked the terms of the debate over the phrase’s meaning when he wrote that U.S. abolitionists had tried to “pervert the meaning of those words, by insinuating that Gallifet treated his negroes so badly that the above expressions are used ironically.” Going on to reference Edwards himself, Schade writes, “My authority, however, is older than that of Abolitionists; I quote literally from a book published in 1801, by a gentleman who visited Hayti at the beginning of the rebellion” (27). See also an 1806 review of Marcus Rainsfords’ An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805) published in the Edinburgh Review wherein the reviewer contests Edwards’s understanding of the phrase (Art III, p. 57).
- 7.
I am influenced here by George Rudé’s concept of “history from below” as the history of the oppressed, but I suggest that Colonial System offers us a history produced from the oppressed. For history from below, see the articles collected in Krantz (1988); and, in the context of the Haitian Revolution, Fick (1990).
- 8.
Vastey may be drawing on the classical usage of the term mânes, notably by Virgil in the Enéide, whom Vastey cites on the title page of Réflexions politiques. In the Enéide, Virgil uses the term mânes at least a dozen times to describe the souls of the dead. See, also Henry S. Frieze and Walter Dennison’s Virgil’s Aenid (1902), pp. 120 and 259. An entry on mânes in the Routledge Dictionary of Cultural References in Modern French also defines the term as the “souls of the dead in the Roman religion” (Mould 192).
- 9.
Wendell Phillips also lamented the problem of relying upon “white sources” in his famous 1861 speech, “Toussaint L’Ouverture:” “I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards,—men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials for his biography are from the lips of his enemies” (476).
- 10.
Vastey’s methodology, in some senses, challenges Hortense Spiller ’s claim that “[i]n a very real sense, a full century or so ‘after the fact’, ‘slavery’ is primarily discursive, as we search vainly for a point of absolute and indisputable origin, for a moment of plenitude that would restore us to the real, rich, ‘thing’ itself before discourse touched it” (qtd. in Aljoe 24).
- 11.
In 1951 the German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (188), suggesting that to compose something beautiful out of something as horrible as the Holocaust was unthinkable. Adorno explains the logic behind this statement in writing that “no art” of the Holocaust could “evade” the fate of attempting to “styliz[e] and titillate readers” into attaining some form of enjoyment out of an event that had no transcendent, abstract meaning for humanity. Adorno writes: “The aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus makes an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims: yet no art which tried to evade them could confront the claims of justice. Even the sound of despair pays its tribute to a hideous affirmation […] When genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage in the themes of committed literature, it becomes easier to play along with the culture which gave birth to murder” (189).
- 12.
The sentiment that the slave could not speak, and therefore that slavery could not really be known by whites, was also articulated early on by Elizabeth Hart Thwaites , “the first known black woman in the Caribbean to write against slavery” (Ferguson 5). In her “Letter to a Friend” (1794), Thwaites wrote of slavery, “It does not suit me to say the worst I know concerning it: only I assure you it comprises a mystery of iniquity, an endless list of complicated ills, which it is not likely you will ever know. You will not, perhaps, find the sufferers disposed to complain of their case. Not many are capable of explaining, however keenly they may feel, their disadvantages” (20).
- 13.
There has been much debate in the historiography of societies of enslavement about whether slavery in fact constituted a “social death.” Yet even if slaves created communities and complex systems of communication and resistance as well as diverse, alternative webs of kinship , all of which calls into question whether slavery actually constituted a social death, the many texts about slavery produced in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World often portray slavery as ultimately reducing human life down to the mere biology of “bare life.” The emptiness of “bare life” is lucidly and eloquently captured in Ewa Ziarek’s words as “damaged life, stripped of its political significance.” For challenges to Patterson’s argument, see Philip D. Morgan (1998), Richard Brent Turner (2004), Frederick Cooper (2005), and Vincent Brown (2008). For a reading of Agamben’s idea of “bare life” in the context of twentieth-century Haiti, see Fischer (2007), and for a reading of Patterson and Agamben together, see Ziarek (2012).
- 14.
The practice that I describe above is often referred to as Vodou but, as Kate Ramsey notes in The Spirits and the Law, “In Haiti the word Vodou has traditionally referred to a particular mode of dance and drumming, and has generally not been figured as an inclusive term for the entire range of spiritual and healing practices… For many practitioners, the encompassing term is not Vodou, but rather Ginen, a powerful moral philosophy and ethical code valorizing ancestral African ways of serving the spirits and living in the world” (7).
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Daut, M.L. (2017). Baron de Vastey’s Testimonio and the Politics of Black Memory. 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_4
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