I learned a lot about Haiti this week, thanks to a writer friend of mine, Madison Smartt Bell. Madison is a white Southerner, raised in Tennessee, but his love of the island and its people is genuine and deep, and gave rise to a critically acclaimed trilogy of historical fiction about Haiti’s successful slave rebellion at the turn of the 19th century. The first book in that trilogy, All Soul’s Rising, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
I think the audience at the lecture was expecting to hear a late-breaking update on the reconstruction of Port-au-Prince, which was struck by a catastrophic earthquake on January 12th of this year. It’s hard for us to grasp the magnitude of that disaster, even with the photographs and video footage fresh in our minds.
Port-au-Prince is Haiti’s capital. I grew up in our own capital, so I set myself the task of imagining what Washington, D.C. might look like after a natural disaster that left nearly a quarter of a million of its residents dead, and flattened many of its grand institutions, including the Capitol and the National Cathedral.
But I just couldn’t picture it. The kinds of disasters I imagined as a child weren’t natural, but man-made. I grew up in a tense period of the Cold War. The threat of a Soviet nuclear strike wasn’t exactly imminent, but it did inform our nightmares.
My friends and I affectionately called Washington “Ground Zero,” since it was sure to be the primary target of a Soviet missile strike. We were pretty sure that the end, when it came, would be quick and apocalyptic.
These days, “Ground Zero” has an entirely different meaning. Our anxieties as a nation shifted dramatically on September 11, 2001. I suppose that’s why the pictures of President Obama and Russian president Dmitri Medvedev sitting at that cramped table in Prague last week, signing the latest nuclear arms reduction pact, seemed oddly behind the times, even though the agreement represents a very significant step forward.
But back to Haiti. Rather than seeing Haiti as the sum of its natural and man-made disasters, or, as some shameless televangelists have claimed, as a people suffering from a divine curse, my friend Madison described a nation that was fiercely proud of its historical legacy.
What, exactly, is that legacy? Haiti is home to the only successful slave rebellion in modern history. These days, that proud fact is often taught here in schools, if only by way of a glancing mention. But for decades after the Haitian revolution of 1804, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slave-holding powers in the region – including, to its shame, the United States – suppressed any mention of that bloody slave revolt, lest word of it inspire their own slaves to rise up.
Haiti, you may remember, was a French colony, the cash cow of Napoleon’s far-flung empire. While Haitians followed the American revolution of 1776 with great interest, they understood that it was largely a tax revolt organized by wealthy land-owners, many of whom owned slaves as well. Among the self-evident truths trumpeted by own Declaration of Independence, the very first is that “all men are created equal.” But of course this wasn’t entirely sincere; slavery was, after all, the law of the land.
The French Revolution of 1789, on the other hand, steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment, and preaching a kind of “Brotherhood” and “Equality” that transcended class, was a much deeper inspiration.
It could be said that the slave rebellion of 1804 doomed Haiti to centuries of poverty and isolation. The sugar and coffee plantations, which were the basis of its entire economy, were destroyed. The great hero of its revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture, was ignominiously kidnapped by the French and imprisoned in France, where he died. The new nation was forced to fight expensive wars to fend off the wealthy nations vying to recolonize it. Its population was largely made up of first and second-generation African slaves who wanted nothing more than to disappear into the hills and live out their lives as subsistence farmers.
To this day, there have been very few peaceful transitions of power in Haiti. Over the years, corruption became a political way of life. A tiny elite came to hold most of the country’s wealth. Totalitarian rule, enforced by domestic terror squads, became the norm.
And yet in one area, the perception of race, Haiti is light years ahead of its neighbors, including the United States. Haitians consider themselves “negre,” or “black,” no matter the color of their skin. Foreigners are considered “blanc,” or “white,” no matter the color of theirs.
This is very confusing for African-Americans visiting from the United States, who are shocked to hear themselves referred to as “white.”
Haiti may be a basket case by every standard we use to judge the success of a nation, but, with much suffering, they’ve achieved an all too rare understanding: one of the least interesting aspects of a person is the color of his skin.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 15 April 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
