What Haiti Teaches
I’ve been thinking about what happened in Haiti two centuries ago.
I’ve been thinking about this island, this little island…
I’ve been thinking about what happened in Africa since the Revolution, what has happened to us, we children of nonhistory.
I’ve been thinking about the abyss under the Atlantic Ocean, from where our mothers and fathers and babies echo their silent screams onto our skin and spirit (We refuse to forget.)
I’ve been thinking about the abyss of the barrio, the shantytown, the ghetto, the favela; these dreamlands which we know are all too real.
Bear witness to the phenomenon of our Body.
See with our own eyes, feel with our own hands, smell with our own noses the world that lays in front of us:
Abuelo knew the world was on fire before he was born.
There are bodies buried not so deep under our feet. We share the same Body.
We know we are dying.
We know we are living.
We know we are unexplainable.
I’ve been thinking about what happened in Haiti two centuries ago.
Haiti teaches us to listen to what we always already knew:
God does not bless a civilization built on severed heads and mutilated children and castrated fathers and disemboweled mothers,
No number of words will make up for the incessant blood that bubbles up from the ground,
We are not the ones in need of saving.
My Body tells me all I need to know about the world.
“j’accepte, j’accepte tout cela.”
In chapter 4 of The Black Jacobins, titled “The San Domingo Masses Begin,” C.L.R. James recounts the slave uprising led by Boukman in 1791 which became the catalyst for the Haitian Revolution. He writes, “By hard experience [the Black slaves] had learnt that isolated efforts were doomed to failure, and in the early months of 1791 in and around Le Cap they were organising for revolution. Voodoo was the medium of the conspiracy. In spite of all prohibitions, the slaves travelled miles to sing and dance and practise the rites and talk” (James 86). It is key to note that, unlike the American and French bourgeois revolutions from years prior, the written word was not necessary. The Word, taken (naively) for granted by Western philosophers as a reliable and stable vehicle for the transference of meaning (Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy”), a means through which Progress may develop, was absent in Haiti. Though a rational and moral imperative for France and the United States, a treatise, a political philosophy was not needed in Haiti. The revolution was self-evident, not for the English or French bourgeoisie, or those of us who are the inheritors of these historical projects. The conspiracy was mediated through Voodoo, a spiritual practice which survived the quotidian ultraviolence of the slave ship and the hellscapes of the plantation. Voodoo, a practice eternally experiential and indefinable, where the borders of life and death, spirit and body, nature and artificial, human and divine, virtual and real, blur into and out of one another.
On the night of the uprising, James writes, “the leaders of the revolt met in an open space in the thick forests of Mourne Rouge, a mountain overlooking Le Cap. There Boukman gave the last instructions and, after Voodoo incantations and the sucking of the blood of a stuck pig, he stimulated his followers by a prayer in creole, which, like so much spoken on such occasions, has remained.” (James 87) We should dare to explore the implications of this event and what followed. To strive to comprehend a Black ontology means to maneuver away from the great analyses provided by Marxist critiques, and towards what Michel-Rolph Trouillot signaled in Silencing the Past. As Trouillot argues, Boukman’s uprising was successful because it was so thoroughly unthinkable for a Western epistemology. If we push further, we can begin to approach an audacious reading of these events. What if we choose to read what happened in Haiti as a successful uprising because Voodoo gods unknown to us granted them victory? This does not have so much to do with whether or not one is a believer or practitioner of Voodoo, but more to do with how willing an analysis is to be enveloped by an Other that refuses transparency.
The heroes of the Haitian Revolution escape all heroisms that are commonplace in bourgeois and vanguard Communist revolutions. The Haitian Revolution escapes history because the violence against the Black Body, and all the significations that follow, is something which the West is incapable of historicizing. So much of Western Thought is dedicated to the erasure of the Black Body. Traditional historical methods primarily rely on the written record in the form of documents and archives. What can a ledger tell me about my kidnapped ancestors, buried alive in the damp, dark hulls of slave ships? (Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”) And what of their names? Phenomenologically, the whites react to the presence of the Black Body simply as non-presence, as if the Black man walking towards them on a lonely sidewalk is simply not there, ignoring the rise in their blood pressure and the dramatic appearance of sweat on their lower backs. (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask) Western epistemology cannot conceptualize of a knowledge that is autonomously African, literatures to which they do not have access to. And so, it simply does not exist. (Léopold Sédar Senghor, “What the Black Man Contributes”)
Haiti teaches us that white people cannot teach us anything about who we are. Haiti teaches that the world which we experience through our Bodies is the World. Haiti reminds us that we don’t have to know the names, languages, beliefs of our ancestors in order to receive their Blessings. All horizons begin and end with the Body, for it is through the Body that we experience Being-Black-in-the-World (Chabani Manganyi).
