Haiti’s Need for a Great South

Haiti's Need for a Great SouthAuthor(s): Jean Casimir, Eglantine Colon, Michelle KoernerSource: The Global South, Vol. 5, No. 1, Special Issue: The Global South and World Dis/Order(Spring 2011), pp. 14-36Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/globalsouth.5.1.14 .Accessed: 01/09/2011 11:46

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14

Haiti’s Need for a Great South

Jean CasimirTranslated from French by Eglantine Colon and Michelle Koerner

ABSTRACT

The island of Ayiti, as it was named by its original inhabitants, was captured by Europeans in 1492. The conquerors enslaved and deci-mated its population and re-peopled it with indentured servants from their own country and captives from the African continent. As the French government could not effectively control the conditions of the new comers from Africa who were brought in en masse at the end of the 18th century, the captives found themselves in a position to ensure that the imposed conditions of living did not affect significantly their inherited identity and their locally accumulated experience. Over the years, they mustered sufficient know-how to build an autonomous sovereign space in the heart of the European exploitive system. They brought the colonial society to an unmanageable crisis, and the is-land, renamed Haiti, severed its links with its captors. The successors of the European colonial world had then to negotiate a modus vivendi with the descendants of the enslaved captives whose society flour-ished during the 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, the United States reinstated the descendants of the Europe-ans in power and took steps to annihilate the knowledge and experi-ence accumulated by the bulk of the population. As a result, the limitations which triggered the destructive crisis at the end of the 18th century are presently forcing the international community to take charge of the sinking Haitian political system they connived with the local oligarchies. The paper concludes proposing a linkage of the local search for identity and self-expression to the effort of people pursuing similar objectives worldwide, in order to salvage the wealth of knowledge accumulated in the two centuries of struggle for na-tional sovereignty.

15Haiti’s Need for a Great South / Jean Casimir Vol.5:1

During the controversy following the Haitian Provisional Electoral Counsel’s announcement of the preliminary results of the general election on November 28, 2010, few people noticed that all meaningful communication in the public sphere unfolded in Creole, the national language. Only the press releases of those representing the international community were walled-in with the im-perial language. But soon after, each faction quickly once again turned their deaf ear to one another, evoking a similar phenomenon that occurred within the political class at the time of the fall of the Duvalier regime and the election of Jean Bertrand Aristide (i.e. from 1986 to 1990). Haitian citizens are pre-vented to grasp and express their particular modernity by a cultural and lin-guistic bottleneck, periodically broken by civil commotions. It is necessary to identify this bottleneck that prevents Haitians to actualize their specific mo-dernity and eliminate it.

The Haitians have been struggling to win their sovereignty since 1790, while the ruling oligarchies and their “international friends” have persisted in excluding them from any dialog. The challenge consists in discovering ways to sustain the intermittent advances of national sovereignty by instituting a social dialog guided by Haiti’s distinctive modernization and grounded in the in-variants of its culture.

It is possible to determine the precise date when the ancestors of the acual inhabitants landed in Haiti and the other islands of the Caribbean archipel-ago. The new comers did not have to insert themselves into a society whose past was lost in infinite time. As for Haiti, the period between 1790 and 1804 separated the history of its people from that of the people of France. And the memory of the past injustices that feed today’s inequalities vividly persists in them. No one can dream of leveling these inequalities while preserving the original iniquities—especially ownership of large tracks of land1—in their aura of untouchable taboos.

Social processes have starting points in Haiti, and one is aware of them. It is known that flagrant injustices we see today blossomed in the graveyard where the original population and the corpses of hundreds of thousands of decimated enslaved rest. One cannot simply erase this aged old truth in order to pursue from an illusory collective amnesia the painful road toward national sovereignty.

The deportation and importation of the groups who had lived together in the country was only completed at the end of the eighteenth century. Apart from the white planters, the ruling oligarchy of the colony comprised two “emancipated,” subaltern and slave-holding property owners: the planters of color, the traditional oligarchy, and a segment of free blacks who climbed the social ladder during the 1790 insurgency. After independance, former slaves and former owners of slaves began to negotiate a workable relationship. Taking place without external interference, the erosion of the social distance between

16 Vol5:1 TheGlobal South

these two groups evolved steadily much to the regret of the members of the oligarchy, who were forced to share their privileges with social strata that were supposed to be subordinated.

In 1915, when the occupation of the country by the United States put an end to the degradation of its sphere of influence, the oligarchy got rid of this company which it found embarrassing. Due to this decisive intrusion, Haiti’s national sovereignty began to crumble at an accelerated space. The twentieth century is a lost one in the history of the Haitian nation. And just as it was not liberated thanks to the support of France, it cannot achieve full sovereignty thanks to the assistance of the United States.

The current perception that Haiti has been living a two-century-old crisis defies the basic premises of the social sciences. This view presupposes continu-ity between the exploitation colony created by the French and the settlement colony conquered by the revolutionaries of 1804. To insinuate that Haiti had a false start is to suggest that the social groups that sponsored independence had a choice between, on the one hand, being exterminated or deported, and, on the other hand, freeing themselves from colonialism. By pursuing the only rational course of action, they defined “universal emancipation” as the itiner-ary of their radical modernization and anchored it in a non-negotiable equality of all human beings (Fischer 225; Nesbitt 107). We cannot think of the mod-ernization of the country outside this premise.

In response, the upholders of the coloniality of power invented a science of the failure of the Haitian people in order to cover up their own inability—an inability that has lasted for two centuries—to salvage the characteristic inequi-ties of slavery capitalism and to profit from the barely sweetened forms of ex-ploitation such as those implemented from the Belgian Congo to Indonesia.

THe “BONANJ” OR THe UNTOUCHABle MAROON

Pa kite lamizè ak grangou fatige bonanj ou is a Creole expression that means “do not let suffering and hunger alter your thoughts or your spirit.” This kind of ex-pression would not be found in the current speech of a francophone Haitian. In local culture, everything goes on as though there were a solution of continuity between the existence of a human being and the conditions of his/her existence. One’s being, “the good angel” (or one’s spirit), is located beyond the circum-stances seen as passing or susceptible to be modified by acts of will. In this way domination or oppression does not immediately alter one’s being. Deborah Jen-son locates this power of human will in the “Proclamation of Haiti’s Indepen-dence by the General in Chief” given on the day of independence, where Dessalines stated that one can be a slave and still dare to be free, just as one can achieve liberty and still become a slave: “We dared to be free when we were not free, by and for ourselves. . . . Slaves . . . [l]et us leave that qualifying epithet to


the French themselves: they have conquered to the point of ceasing to be free” (“Dessalines’s American Proclamations, 81, 89).

The modernity of the Haitian nation, as any other modernity, is predi-cated on the availability of an option to transform one’s existence and progress toward a future of one’s own choosing. The people addressed by Dessalines’s speech came from a world quite different than that of the plantation system. Colonialism sought to imprison this people in an abnormal set of norms and values, while lacking the wherewithal indispensable to keep them in such a prison or to account for their alleged subordonate status. In order to achieve its objectives, the colonial empire should have monopolized, over a long period of time, every space where the autonomous will of the kidnapped people could be exercised, and should have rendered every effect of the autonomy meaningless or insignificant. In other words, it would have required from the intended plantation society an unwavering control over the totality of the new comers’ conditions of existence. Throughout its kidnapping and as long as the memory of having been kidnapped persisted, the captive population could hardly pre-vent itself from salvaging in its inner self its identity and the awareness of its distinctiveness. This awareness became the refuge for an inalienable embryo of sovereignty and autonomy (Zavaleta 99), the space where the population re-produced itself as a set of human beings, the shrine of its inviolable and un-touchable “bonanj.”

In Saint-Domingue, the enslaved labor force did not reproduce itself in the framework of its living conditions; it had to be bought and replenished on the market in order to be prepared for absorption into the plantation system—in order to be ready for its cannibalistic consumption, as Laennec Hurbon puts it (Le Barbare Imaginaire, 147–69). The captive was then produced outside the slave economy. Within the plantation system, the empire fabricated a distinct being, a stranger to herself/himself, a zombie. The shackled prisoner was the bearer of a sovereign universe that preceded slavery and that he kept reproduc-ing by taking shelter from colonialism or zombification in a world situated beyond capitalism (Barthélémy 19). The functioning of this distinct universe within Saint-Domingue explains the continual production of diverse processes and institutions of enslavement put in place by the colonial society—namely, the continual implementation of the coloniality of power and of knowledge.

In analyzing the political presence of the Bossales2 in the colonial society, one observes that their descendants3 elaborated and secured in all circum-stances the instruments of resistance to official policies and, thereby, their tools to negotiate with the dominant oligarchies. These instruments are dis-cernable in the safeguard of their “bonanj” separated from the slave identity proposed by the dominant system, and in the organization of a minimum of private life in the heart of the enslavement process. Their fulfledged develop-ment characterized the setting up a community life in the nineteenth century


lakou4 and in the structuration of a counter-plantation system and in the struc-turalization of an oppressed culture (Casimir 1991:117; Casimir 2004:229). This defense of their interests impacted the functioning of the state, which, throughout the entire nineteenth century, was unable to institutionalize its structural dependency.

Due to its origin in the private life of the working population, national sov-ereignty both contested the demands of international economy and remained barred from understanding the functioning of that economy. On one hand, there were no social practices in the private sphere providing an exposure to the outer world where the Haitian population could learn the processes that held sway in the international economy. On the other hand, the very structure of the system of exploitation reproduced its opacity and prevented subordinates from penetrating it. The oligarchies monopolizing state power derived their preemi-nent status from services rendered to the colonial empire and preserved their privileges by producing and maintaining the oppressed as irredeemable aliens.

Private life created by the enslaved out of the inheritance cultivated in their inner self therefore remained imprisoned by unforeseeable innovations of the dominant society. The autonomous and sovereign world they protected and preserved evolved in an impasse and could not develop an itinerary corre-sponding to its internal structure. The enslaved invented a universe in response to external dominant propositions postulating their non-existence as human beings. Even though they managed to salvage a space oblivious of this enslave-ment and could eventually break the chains of subjection, they could not liber-ate this space from the conditions which compelled its construction in the first place. The outside world eluded them precisely for the very reason that the French society remained powerful enough to tranform them into beasts of burden and to reproduce them as such.

As a result, while the individual, his community, and possibly his nation may manage themselves freely within an unassailable citadel, they do not nec-essarily break through the siege of the colonial world. In this way, they cease-lessly reproduce—through their responses to external aggression—the captivity of their universe and of their local history. With each new response to aggression, the aggressor also becomes better equipped and intensifies the strangulation of the dissenters until total exhaustion is achieved. The op-pressed community may establish itself autonomously in the mountains or on an islet and may be ready to defend itself to the death; the country may pro-claim its independence; but all of these exploits, even if they prolong the com-munity’s existence, do not put an end to its imprisonment. Domination remains rooted in the metropole, beyond the reach of prisoners. And since the oppressed increase the sophistication of their parries with each tightening of the noose, it has been two centuries now that they have constituted a majority of the population, despite high mortality rates and increasing outmigration.


The contradiction and asymmetry between the internal autonomy of the Haitian way of life and the adverse condition of existence that besieges it serve as bedrock for its class relations during the nineteenth century and for the state erected after the 1915 occupation by the United States. From 1804 to 1915, the local way of living contesting colonialism, racism, and slavery circumscribed the power structure within the state and resisted the impact of the interna-tional community. Yet, the political power of the state had to be negotiated with a more powerful colonial, slavery-based, and racist international commu-nity, where events evolved away from the control of the local community.

We must recall that in 1804, the oligarchs or anciens libres of Saint-Domingue found themselves unwillingly on the side of the cuurent working masses—the nouveaux libres or new freemen. They did so because the metro-pole disowned them and even took steps to exterminate and deport them. After independence, the oligarchs were unable to control the lives of the rural populations and thus a painful and laborious negotiation between them and the workers began. It was at this period in time that the rural working popula-tion, called cultivateurs by the oligarchs, appropriated the term habitants, pre-viously reserved to the oligarchy of free colored.

By contrast, after 1915, the oligarchy and the United States—the new metropole—joined forces in an attempt to disarticulate national sovereignty, while the oppressed survived and pursued an autonomous course. In such cir-cumstances each day was certainly more painful, but the oppressed salvaged their autonomy all the same.

THe “HABiTANTS” BefORe ANd AfTeR iNdepeNdeNCe

A key concept in Haitian thought is the notion of “moun,” or person, as ex-pressed in the well-known saying “Tout moun se moun” (every person is a per-son).5 The local parlance has a phrase related to this seminal value, namely the expression moun andeyò, or persons from the outside, which Gérard Barthé-lémy uses in his classic work, Le pays en dehors, on the Haitian society. While every person is equivalent, the majority of the population perceives and identi-fies itself as a group situated outside of a circle, as a segment which neverthe-less enjoys the same rights as those who live within the circle. It goes without saying that the opinion of this majority is not shared by those confined in the center of the circle, i.e. the moun lavil, or persons from the city, the urbanites.

This self-definition is consistent with another surprising one that the rural masses appropriated from the vocabulary of the oligarchy. It serves to orient their organization of the territory after independence and to establish, precisely, the equivalence of all persons in Haitian thought. After the Seven Year War and before the success of the insurgency, these so-called emancipated persons,6 and most particularly the traditional oligarchy, had to measure themselves


against social discriminations imported from the metropole. They insisted that they were the real habitants or settlers of the territory in lieu of the metropolitan born colonists (Moral 352).7 They wished to be called American colonists.

In the parlance of the francophone Caribbean, the term habitant is syn-onymous with colonist, which, understood in a literal sense, designates those who inhabit the colony. The habitants considered themselves as the “real own-ers” of the country insofar as they possessed habitations, meaning the planta-tions around their residence, and paid their taxes. Upon this basis, they claimed their civil and political rights and succeeded in their cause at the General As-sembly on March 8, 1790. In the same period, the Jacobins in the Assembly refused to use the term slave to designate the captive workers in the colonies, leading the Assembly to use the term “African” or “cultivateur” instead. These denominations had the virtue of defining both the alien character and the status of the majority of the population.

Along similar lines, Jean-Pierre Boyer, following the edict of Charles X “conceding independence to Saint-Domingue,” put forward his notorious rural police code of 1826. In the Rural Code, the central character remained, as in colonial times, the large landowner or leasee of state-owned land. This law designated this key element of the economy as habitant, just as the French Rev-olution’s American colonists had wanted it, and used the designation cultivateur to refer to rural workers, as requested by the French General Assembly of 1790.

And yet, over time, the term habitant became, in local parlance, synony-mous with cultivateur, or moun andeyò, and was appropriated by the rural pop-ulation, whereas the concept of cultivateur fell into disuse. The rural population not only succeeded in keeping the law in check, but also came to consider themselves as the habitants of the territory, i.e. those who live there and thus the true dwellers or settlers, if not the real owners of the land.

In order to designate a social actor, to give him/her a name, and to impose this name to the society as a whole, one has to have power.8 One cannot over-look the might of these self appointed habitants in the state. It exceeded the force wielded by the American colonists, unable as they were to compel the met-ropolitan state to consider them real habitants or colonists.

By the same token, these habitants, or the bulk of the rural population, seemed to have taken note of the colonial subordination of their world (what contemporary observers would call internal colonialism) when they located themselves “outside”—moun andeyò—the aforementioned circle of adminis-trators of the rural area and of the urban population in general.

To live in independent Haiti and reside in it precisely as “a person from the outside” was to contest—on the basis of a radical conception of equality between human beings—the social relation upon which the plantation economy rested: the reproduction of the labor force by means of the slave trade. Outside slavery capital-ism “persons are equivalent to each other” and reproduce themselves locally by


their own means. Therefrom, the habitants effectively asserted sovereign control of the social milieu in which they moved and took refuge from the state, the agent of both internal and external colonialism.

Thus emerged the range of institutions which organized the counter-plan-tation system: from the lakou to the linking of rural market places around which farming villages—des bourgs-jardins—which functioned as nodes of rural life and entry point of the public administration (Anglade 39). It was at this crossroads that the relations between the moun andeyò and the moun lavil—that is, the relations of the “people from the outside” to the world econ-omy—were negotiated.

From the sheltering of private life in the workshops of slave plantations to the settlement of deportees in the countryside and, ultimately, to their connec-tion to the centers of communication set up by the rural markets—a full-fledged savoir-faire managed the determinants of local life. Along this line of development, unprecedented relations with the outside world, the world econ-omy, could have been invented. But just as the aboriginal Haitians wondered at the winds that carried Christopher Columbus’s caravels to land on their beaches, the new habitants, or the new settlers of Haiti, could no more fathom what energy source fueled the power of the urban dwellers than they could effectively deal with the shocks they caused within their universe. Similarly, large sectors of the oligarchy, the newly emancipated elite, buoyed up by the waves of social mobility caused by the 1790 insurgency, found themselves in-creasingly confounded by the complexities of the international community.9

At the end of the nineteenth-century, the management of the relation-ships with the global economy crashed against a wall of incomprehension. The “outside world,” built by the descendents of enslaved people who were set to be exterminated in the modernization projects of Napoleon Bonaparte, perceived the existence of the circle that encompassed them, but it did not know how to deal effectively with the managers of that circle. In its daily practices, the world of the “outside people” could not figure out how to bring this other uni-verse into a social dialog that would recognize the validity of what essentially defined them.

THe COURSe Of COlONiAliTy

The creation of Haiti’s state in 1804 was not a choice. In asserting and operation-alizing their internal sovereignty, the enslaved forced the oligarchy to declare the colony independent. In order to administer the state, both branches of the oligar-chy—the traditional and wealthy strata of colored planters and the new recruits, generally black officers, emerging from the indigenous army as provincial land-lords—were compelled to satisfy the requisites of the global power system. The policies they formulated, particularly in relation to agricultural development,


could hardly be perceived by the “habitants” as distinct courses of action. They preserved a key foundation of Western statehood, namely the right to use and abuse one’s property, as a sacred and untouchable cornerstone of the political structure. From the inception of the nation-state, they thereby set up the limits of social cohesion and the divide between the masses and the oligarchs.

A population of expatriated persons, who had themselves previously been properties of third parties, as well as their descendants, could not possibly build their future without a new definition of private ownership (Fick 152). Neces-sarily, the right to the use and abuse of one’s property had to bear the burden of negotiating this new definition. The Haitian state, entangled in the power sys-tem of Western modernity, therefore remained, and still remains, a contested institution because it could not, and still cannot, assert—by virtue of its nature and the circumstances in which it emerged—internal national sovereignty without transforming its basic principles. After 1804, and precisely after the assassination of Dessalines in 1806, the oligarchy had neither the courage nor the interest to defend on the international stage an internal sovereignty con-structed to safeguard non-negotiable demands of the former enslaved.

Because they were able to control the labor force and fend off its anarchic tendencies, the governments of Toussaint and Christophe have been the only ones that achieved a margin of success in protecting the economic interests of the large landowners. This achievement would seem to justify a well-known remark made by Louis Joseph Janvier that formulated the basic ideology of the Haitian state, its manipulations, and its abuses of power:

Political freedom is a good that is inferior to national independence. The people usually sacrifice the former more easily than they would the latter. They prefer, rightly, a national dictatorship, even if tyrannical and unin-telligent, to foreign domination, even if that domination were the most liberal, the most benign in the world, the most promising of fulfillments and the most generous in providing superficial improvements. (28–29)

Therefore, from the dawn of independence, the radical equivalence between freedom and equality did not fit the oligarchy’s notion of good government. As a result, it felt free to experiment with any possible means to reduce the working population to a status as close as possible to enslavement in order to secure its own independence and freedom from “foreign” domination. The state became the prime sponsor of a “sovereignty from above,” which guaranteed non-inter-ference of colonial empires in supposedly “national” affairs. The political inter-ests of the oligarchy were conceived as guarantor of its economic ones.

These narrow notions of independence and sovereignty became synony-mous all along the history of independent Haiti. The nation within which the State was supposed to emerge was perceived as a normative entity to be built in a nation-building process unrelated to the actual people and their self definition.


The requirements of colonial empires, in their dealings with the oligarchies, determined the shape and nature of the nation. Rooted in the international sys-tem where they were originally created, the oligarchies structured a formal po-litical system while stifling popular sovereignty, because the latter contravened the features of the world system of power. They located the source of knowledge necessary to rule and stay in power in the sphere of foreign relations, while the management of domestic affairs, and hence the promotion of social cohesion and national identity and solidarity, was subordinated to limits fixed by this same raison d’État. “Sovereignty from above” was stillborn.

On the one hand, following principles inherited from the Englighten-ment, the state made every effort to destroy local production of knowledge and know-how. Political structure is renewed through state monopoly on the orga-nization and distribution of science imported from the international commu-nity. Centers of higher education (the agregation of which would eventually constitute the State University of Haiti) became sites for the dissemination of foreign recipes instead of functioning as research centers, targeting the local circumstances.

On the other hand, the oligarchies clinged to a cultural version of social darwinism and gave themselves an ethnocidal civilizing mission bordering on racism, which reinforced their inability to carry on a dialog with the habitants. To the extent that they failed to employ, and therefore exploit, the habitants they found no good reason to interrupt their monologue in order to promote social welfare. So since they had neither interest nor inclination to undertake their self-imposed civilizing mission, they originally entrusted most of it to the Breton clergy through a concordat signed with the Catholic Church in June 1862 (Hurbon, Religions et Lien Social 143). From the second half of the twentieth century, they gradually abandoned most of this space and function, turning them over to foreign-based non-governmental organizations.

Therefore, as the clutch of imperialism tightened at the end of the nine-teenth century and as the provincial branch of the oligarchy exerted increas-ingly embarrassing pressure on the central government, the ruling classes not only became powerless faced with the United States’ projects to annex the country but welcomed the takeover with open arms, despite minor reserva-tions about the wordings of the Occupation Treaty. “Il y en a qui préfèrent les Cacos à la Convention” (Some persons prefer the Cacos10 to the Convention), as one singer of the era ironically put it.11 Auguste Magloire, the owner of one of the two daily newspapers of the Republic expressed more bluntly his opin-ion of the rebellious rural dwellers, sovereign people of the country, in an edi-torial published on October 11, 1919: “I will not surprise anyone if I say that the déclassés and vagrants compose the huge majority of our populations. . . . We are dealing with vulgar cut-throats that our society has an obligation to consider as its enemy” (qtd. in Gaillard 271).


Taking hold of Haiti, the American Occupation had obviously no diffi-culty in absorbing the oligarchy and in taking steps to integrate the popular masses into the processes of its own development.12 It exasperated the social fissures and revived the separations between the two sectors of the oligarchy, enhancing the role of skin color as a social marker. By so doing, it eliminated the rural leaders from the ruling class to the great satisfaction of the tradi-tional lightskinned oligarchy.

Moreover, unrestrained by excessive German commercial influence and strengthened by the arrival of relatively less prominent Syro-Lebonese retail-ers, the traditional oligarchy indulged itself in observing the extermination of rural political forces by the U.S. Marines. Furthermore, along with the Church, it applauded the Occupation’s aggressions against voodoo and its practitioners; and not long after the occupying forces left, both state and tra-ditional oligarchy endorsed the persecution of voodoo practitioners under-taken with systematic zeal by the Catholic Church. Pierre Hudicort’s remark expressed the contempt of this branch of the oligarchy for the core of the na-tion: “[I]t is important to teach the Haitian people what freedom is before telling them to make use of it” (qtd. in Gaillard 93).

It is no wonder that members of the power elite hardly reacted to the mas-sacre of Haitian settlers carried out in the Dominican Republic at the end of the 1930s. Moreover, the ruling class did its best to ensure that the genocide did not disturb the friendship between the government of Haiti, headed by Stenio Vincent, and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of the neighboring country. Fi-nally, during World War II, the government of Haiti adopted a series of mea-sures to dispossess the habitants in order to make land available for the production of key commodities necessary for the allied effort.

The Revolution of 1946 put an end to the unbridled flourishing of the traditional oligarchy and assisted the upcoming of the black sector discrimi-nated under the policies of the Occupation. Arm in arm, like Siamese twins, both segments of the oligarchy benefitted from post-war economic growth. From the Cold War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, they confortably installed themselves in the United States’ sphere of influence.

From 1915 to the present days, the new metropole dictated the most im-portant policies of the national oligarchy and effectively governed through its intermediary while helping assiduously to maintain military control over the rural populations. The power of the state, put in place by the United States, became the prime weapon for the destruction of the power in the state—that is, the minimal degree of sovereignty the habitants still held on to.


THe COURSe Of SOveReiGNTy

Given the conditions of the populations settled in the slave colony of Saint-Domingue and considering that control over their private lives constitutes the original cell of their sovereignty, it follows that the primary instrument for the construction and reproduction of this sovereignty is the Creole language—the exclusive creation of the emerging nation. In his pioneering study, Félix Pru-dent underscores the contributions of several French coastal regions in Carib-bean francophone speech, showing how they have developed in the colonial setting so that they have become the exclusive property of the “habitants” and the subordinated classes.13 In a similar vein, Jean Fouchard (434–436) illus-trates that several captives expressed themselves in regional dialects of the Atlantic coast of the metropole, just as their masters did. One can deduce from these studies that most French people living in the colony did not speak the dialect of the Île-de-France in their private lives. Parisian French would be reserved to a small minority of the oligarchy and public functionaries. Prudent observes that “the colonial order is, at the beginning, the order of the language and of the speech of the master, of the foreigner, of the conqueror” (35).

This foundational situation has still not changed in twenty-first century Haiti, and the existence of two distinct linguistic communities of uneven social status bears witness to the persistence of the colonial situation. Creole and French spoken by these communities do not have the same origins, do not ad-dress the same speakers, do not refer to the same activities and do not have the same impact on public or private spheres of life. Creole is not a variety of French; the two languages are distinct in their grammar, their syntax, and their lexicon. Therefore, each linguistic community retains its power to give a meaning to its environment and maintain its control over its discourse and its history, but the French speaking one has more immediate access to the imperial world and the political structure sponsored by the hegemonic metropolitan country.

That Creole was considered until very recently a dialect results from the fact that certain social classes, associated with the imperial powers, misappro-priated the right to certify which of the two languages was the legitimate one. Conversely, the universal use of Creole since the nineteenth century both re-veals the limitations of these dominant classes and the actual power of the op-pressed ones.

In transforming the languages of coastal France—modified by the contri-butions of African ethnic groups—into a lingua franca, the colonized expressed their capacity to give meaning to their sociopolitical environment, thereby dis-playing their ability to discriminate what was right and what was unjust. This display of agency through language use—through the creation of meaning within their environment—is an assertion of political and social power (Tol-mach Lakoff 76). The question of whether or not this power is established and


implemented within state structures is a question completely foreign to that of its actual existence.

The well-known Acaau saying, reported by Gustave d’Allaux in 1860 and quoted in full by Mimi Sheller (112), can appear in this context as a descrip-tion of the devide in the social structure: “Negue riche qui connait li et ecri, cila mulâte; mulâte pauve qui pas connait li ni ecri, cila negue“. (The rich black who knows how to read and write is a mulatto, but the poor mulatto who doesn’t know how to read or write is a black). Whereas the use of the state language becomes a vehicule of structural dependency, Creole operates as a vehicle of social cohesion and national identity for the entire set of people that inhabits the colony. Both Saint-Domingue and Haiti, as despotic states built, in the language of Blandine Kriegel (57), through violence and contempt for the working population perpetuated themselves by securing “rights” they derived from the appropriation through conquest or theft of spaces that belonged to third persons. The exclusion of the Creole language from the sphere of power remains the most secure way to implement coloniality and the principles that set the social classes apart.

The oligarchies, formed out of a Eurocentric mold, are particularly incom-petent in a political field without landmarks. They always look for a model and cannot imagine themselves relying on their own ingenuity in order to survive. Inheritors of the French colony, they remain the sole bilingual group and, as long as they wall themselves in the fortress of colonial power, the working peo-ple cannot dethrone them. The language of the people sets up another sort of barricade, where sovereignty is safeguarded out of the reach of the dominant culture, yet cutting the people off from any enriching external influence.

Given the political implications of this linguistic fortress erected by the rural population, the political establishment presents its built-in oppressed culture in such a disfavorable way that its most valuable resources go unper-ceived. Shielded by its illiteracy and isolation, local thought is nonetheless brought to produce its own knowledges, norms, and values laying outside the discipline of the dominant culture, which enables it to denounce and subvert the petty arguments of coloniality by turning them back against their authors. In the Declaration of Independence, Dessalines made explicit, once again, what would be obvious to a survivor of crimes against humanity—namely, that the French were the “implacable enemies of the Rights of Man” (Jenson, Be-yond the Slave Narrative, Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts 90). It would require a very special dialectic to demonstrate the contrary to Haitians in 1804, while today only thanks to a collective amnesia can doubt be cast on Dessalines’s appreciation.

Processes of thought anchored in local history seem to justify fear of built-in isolation. However, the apprehension is unwarranted, given the favorable impact on forward thinking intellectuals and pressure groups, particularly


merchants and businessmen, made by the presentations of Dessalines and Baron de Vastey to the public of the United States and Europe (Daut 2011). Far from isolating themselves from the modern world with their radical anti-colonial position, Dessalines and de Vastey uncovered aspects of the Haitian Revolution, made invisible by the narratives officialized by the colonial em-pires, and triggered the awareness of the well-intentioned readers as well as the interest of businessmen. The plea of the Baron de Vastey, ideologue of the kingdom of Henry Christophe, was all the more remarkable insofar as it joined the perspective of Dessalines with the instruments of thought he inherited from his French education.

In other words, independent of the question of whether they ultimately belonged to one of the two systems of thought organizing social life in Saint-Domingue and in Haiti, Dessalines and de Vastey—not to mention Toussaint—gave an account of their revolutionary world without the slightest difficulty. Their practice, rooted in both systems of thought operating in the colony, echoes Walter Mignolo’s reflections on border-thinking and how those evolving at the margins of contrasting worldviews can access universal or, better still, pluriversal vision (85). Any fear of being caught on one side or another of the line dividing different cultural sets is eliminated once the colo-niality of power is denounced and once the right to sovereignty of human groups is recognized.

From this perspective, one should be able to devise an opening of Haitian culture and society and a flourishing of national sovereignty. The key is to an-chor a vision of the future in both an uncompromising hold on the nature of national (internal) sovereignty and an awareness of its inherent limitations. Ac-celerated degradation of available resources and increasing control over local conditions of existence by the capitalist economy consistently erode the tradi-tional efficacy of the internal sovereignty. This sovereignty is as essential to the modernization of the nation as it is incompatible to the designs of the interna-tional community. If one acknowledges the vitality of the Creole language, re-pository and testimony of the oppressed culture, it would be unwise to forecast its disappearance. However advanced its strangulation may be, it is still alive.

Ephemeral and inadequate social improvements and survival strategies temporarily counter oppression but do not enable the population to overcome its precarious condition of existence. The resources of domination and the scale of the subjection to which the dominated are submitted far outweigh these resistance efforts. The reproduction of the oppressed as a sovereign subject does not depend on conditions of existence that they are powerless to modify, but domination—the evil to be eradicated—is nonetheless located in a dimen-sion that they can not act upon. This domination is in the process of annihilat-ing them and they have to discover a terrain where they can confront it from within their own postulates and their own history of oppression.


INSCRiBiNG THe diAlOGUe iN THe GlOBAl SOUTH

The Haitian people chiseled their sovereignty while opposing the design of a colonial empire. It should therefore not be surprising that an international community set up by these empires has relentlessly violated Haitian sover-eignty. The undefatigable presence of this community at the sick-bed of the local oligarchy, the government, and the state, helps to diagnose the fragility that condemns these entities to structural dependency, but hardly restitutes to the people their scorned sovereignty. France from the era of Napoleon to 1915 did everything in its power to prevent the nation from achieving its full poten-tials and survive with autonomy. Similarly, the United States, from 1915 until today, is incapable of assisting it in recovering its autonomy.14 Sovereignty and, one could add, modernization, promised by the “cunning rhetoric of (the in-ternational community’s) agents”15 can neither be imported nor exported. The nation of Haiti can neither overcome its poverty nor modernize itself if it doesn’t produce both sovereignty and modernity from its own basic values—which is to say, if the country is not governed by its own sovereign people.

Culture and sovereignty are inseparable. To reconcile internal and exter-nal sovereignty is particularly challenging for a former colony. Various param-eters have to be taken into account and the perspective presented here privileges one of them: the vehicle par excellence of the people’s thought. In order to recuperate its sovereignty, the people of Haiti have to fight for the right to its own way of thinking and, therefore, to its own language and its own culture.

In Haiti, the use of French and Creole is not universal. Power is wielded and displayed in the imperial language and those who do not master it belong, by definition, to the “marginal majority.” Those who speak Creole only wall themselves in the impenetrable fortress of their language and defend them-selves from within this strategic position. They have never had the option to dissolve themselves in the francophone world, into which they were never in-vited, and neither France colonialism nor the internal colonialism of the oli-garchy ever had the power necessary to oblige them to do so. The oppressed people of Saint-Domingue and Haiti muster significant political force, but their difficult task has always been to open the doors of dominant political institutions—that is to say, to wield their power, most particularly the one embedded in their language.

The ruling minority can only secure its prevalence thanks to the flagrant and decisive interventions of foreign powers, whether the expeditions of Leclerc’s army in 1802, the interventions of the U.S. Marines in 1915, or the troops of the United Nations after the fall of the Berlin’s Wall. Left to itself, the ruling minority would gradually be engulfed by those it wishes to exploit. From the arrival of the French to the present day, this minority, born of the Enlightenment, does not speak with the subaltern classes that it considers to


be foreign. It presumes to guide them along the path of western civilization, which it takes to be the one and only civilization, and to dictate to them how to progress towards the future. Nonetheless, this minority will not commit itself for a single second to the realization of this task.

Now, the oppressed culture does not have the means to break away from its prison and free its bearers from external initiatives and aggressions. The knowledge it produces deals in internal shadows, but cannot dissipate the opacity of the forces that besiege it. Its life closes in on itself.

Threfore, the “habitants” elaborated and implemented their own forms of social organization in the years spanning from Independence to the American Occupation in 1915. Through a process facilitated by the ostracism of the in-ternational community, these forms of organizations held in check the franco-phones’ tentative hegemony and their social projects. Thereby the masses forced the oligarchs to accept the beginnings of a dialogue, which can be per-ceived in the alternations of both regional leaders and literate and illiterate heads of state. In this way, a limited space emerged where the national com-munity gave meaning to its everyday life, formulated shared conceptions of itself and its environment, and progressed toward the common establishment of a nation—one in its history, its present, and its projects for the future.

When the ties between the new metropole and the oligarchy were strengthened as a consequence of the American Occupation, the pretentions this privileged group of people bestowed upon itself as paladins of a civilizing mission further set apart the two sectors of the population (Manigat 91). With the reconquest of the island by the imperial world, the strained conversation of the nineteenth century breaks into two monologues.16 The dialogue between the deaf that characterized the colonial period is reinstated.

From the Occupation onwards, both oponents and incumbents in the power elite are completely powerless and cannot hide it. Both sectors of the oligarchy strive for a bulimic consumption of novelties only accessible to their members instead of building a gradual and deliberate control over the environ-ment and an awareness that the Haitian community can, by its own means, progress toward a better future (Manigat 12). As far as members of the actual power elite are concerned, the acquisition and ownership of gadgets remain the primary purpose of modernization, and the set of local policies and mea-sures that could eventually generate such modernization are perceived as a set of useless if not of doomed investments.17 In a word, the oligarchy becomes the principal obstacle to national sovereignty and, for this reason, the chief hurdle to the modernization of the country.

Most famous representatives of Haitian intellectuality expressed timid res-ervations with respect to the modalities of foreign intervention, while at the same time asserting their competence and experience in pursuing the declared objectives of these investments. They still like to depict themselves as the experts


of national uplift and to blame the limits of their success on the negative conse-quences of the 1804 epopeia, such as the disorganized political activity of rural and urban masses and their excessive readiness to follow discontent ambitious and impatient leaders.

The American Occupation restricted the impact of local political mili-tancy and occasioned a double opening for the intellectual elite. On one hand, this group, belittled by the arrogance of the military leaders of the US Navy, attempted to make a discrete connection with the rural world of the habitants, with Jean Price-Mars and the Indigenous School (Trouillot 361).18 The intel-lectual elite accepted the principle of some cultural contributions inherited from Africa, which it fell to them to explore, screen, and develop. The discov-ery of their connection to the habitants – what it called Africa – revived the sense of the injustices of the racialization of social relations that the Occupa-tion restored. Therefrom the rights of the “black elite” to participate equally in the intended national uplift along with the “mulatto elite,” came to the fore-front of the political tractations, but without affecting the exclusion of the rural population fostered by the Occupation.

On the other hand, the intellectual elite relied on its identification with the Latin world to justify its preeminence and to denounce the injustices and en-croachments of the Occupation against its privileged position. The indigenous movements of Latin American, as well as the revolutions these movements ini-tiated during the first half of the twentieth-century, stimulated their opposition to the North-Americans, conceived as Saxons endangering their role as promo-tors of a Latin worldview among the underprivileged masses of the country and the Black populations of the American and African continents.

The connection to the Latin world was deepened during the second half of the twentieth century, when branches of the intellectual elite inserted themselves into the Latin-American dissident groups, also persecuted by the cold war policies of the United States. This connection, however, led to the intellectuals’ immersion in the local rural masses, a qualitatively different situ-ation from the ties of the interwar period, in large part due to the closer rela-tionships developed with advocates of peasant guerilla warfare.

Moreover, the influence exercised by the proponents of liberation theol-ogy, and the improvements in social communication occasioned by the Vatican II Council, promoted the presence, on the political stage, of the habitant worldiew and its privileged vehicle—the Creole language. As a result, during the 1980s, the connection between the intellectual elite and the masses came close to an immersion reminiscent of the 1804 mobilization.

But the two segments of the ruling oligarchy, far from falling in line be-hind the insurrecting people, strengthened their ties with the United States in order to shield themselves against the floodgates opened up by the fall of the Duvallier dictatorship in 1986. During the decade that followed, they gave up,


once again with the complicity of the political class and the intellectual elites, an increasingly large portion of national sovereignty. An intensified participa-tion in neoliberalism, mistaken for modernization, appears to be the tradeoff for this loss of national sovereignty.

The process of deterioration that followed accelerated the exodus of rural populations, reaching alarming rates in the 1990s. The more a panicked inter-national community increased its interventions, the louder it claimed that only the Haitians could solve their own problems. Everything indicates that, ac-cording to this view, the solution for the Haitian people woud be to request once and for all one form or another of international tutorship.

The limited resources of sovereignty—further diminished by the alliance of the oligarchy, the political elite, and the international community—leave the Haitian people with very few viable options. A review of the genesis and evolution of this sovereignty indicates the following trends:

1) The Haitian nation established its sovereignty by rejecting the nineteenth century modern, colonialist, and racist state; hence the insurmountable obstacles to its participation in the emerging alliance of nation-states. Current analyses of nineteenth century Haiti insist upon the negative impact of the ostracism of the country by the international community. It seems obvious nonetheless that one cannot expect from the expanding modern capitalist Western world that it would or should “understand” the specific agenda of the “former slaves” of Saint-Domingue. In fact, the actual osctracism may be interpreted with advantage as a departure from the course of action chosen the Western world. Therefore the fundamental obstacle to the modernization of Haiti resides, not in the actions of the Western world, but in the very characteristics of its oppressed culture, which does not and cannot produce knowledge oriented toward a mastery of the exter-nal universe that imprisons it. This “external universe” nor the local Haitian universe could not possibly conceive or follow any other course of action.

2) During the wars of independence, the sovereignty from within which the oppressed culture emerged proved that the emerging Haitian people was equipped to protect effectively the national interests on both local and interna-tional political stages. Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and de Vastey expressed this sovereignty, either directly or through their intermediar-ies. They exposed their autonomous worldview in the international press seek-ing to influence interested pressure groups. If we transpose this experience to the contemporary era, the primary task of today’s intellectuals would be to open up the local culture in order to enable it to formulate clearly those posi-tions that derive from its permanent features. The role played by the secretaries of those who have given the best expressions of national sovereignty—Tous-saint and Dessalines—is vacant. It is necessary to first fill up this role of secre-tary and to clarify today’s key orientations, before participating in the discussion and elaboration of such orientations.


3) The present context for conquering once more Haiti’s national sover-eignty presupposes a mastery of Creole and French languages on the part of both intellectuals and masses. Such mastery would enable them to optimize the autonomy of each member of the society, to get rid as much as possible of the intermediation, and to promote direct access to the outside world by the bearers of the local culture. This objective is not technically achievable nowa-days, but the development of research in the human sciences should look in this direction.

4) Invested in an intense dialogue with the bearers of national sovereignty, the Haitian intellectual elite would no longer define itself as a Latin entity. Following the path paved by Toussaint, Dessalines, and de Vastey, they should make alliances with appropriate partners on the international stage. In the world in which we live, it is advisable to knock not only on the door of dissi-dent metropolitan sectors, but also on the doors of the Global South. In this way, the national difference will be enriched by the contributions of cultures and forms of thought that are also committed to the defense of their sover-eignty and to the creation of spaces of expression and development.

An inward-oriented outlook aiming at a full blossoming of the local cul-ture requires recognition of the fact that the dominant western way of think-ing is not really exterior to it, insofar as the local worldview builds itself in response to the aggressions of the latter. Both the difficulties to master locally the dominant way of thinking and the invisibility of its content are inherent to the Haitian oppressed culture, whose subalternity is a deliberate product of the national Latin culture.

The enhancement of the local creativity and its capacity to broaden itself depend on an opening to horizons different from the western one, together with a planned effort to universalize our special brand of bilinguism and de-velop in depth sociolinguistic studies focusing on the conversations actually taking place among the Haitian people. A mastery of Creole is the unescapable condition for self-knowledge, while a mastery of the imperial language opens up to both western culture and other cultures of the world. The prison in which the oppressed culture emerged can be overcome by opening both its doors to all contemporary forms of thought.

Above all, research into universes whose history are several centuries older than the modern western world enables one to break the vicious circle created by the reciprocal determination of dominant and dominated national cultures. Moreover, Sub-Saharan Africa, the indigenous civilization of the Americas, China, India, and the Muslim world are today all embarked on an affirmation of their sovereignty in the face of the presumptions of a Eurocentrist global-ization. They charge themselves, on this basis, with the construction of a world where everyone can achieve their own flourishing existence without having to look for the disintegration of others. This fulfillment is within the reach of the


nation of Haiti, provided it does not let itself be blinded by the Roi Soleil and his disciples, but instead sovereignly maps out its own course.

Notes

1. “Et les pauvres nègres dont les pères sont en Afrique, ils n’auront donc rien !” (And the poor negroes whose fathers are in Africa, shall they stay with nothing! Jean‐Jacques Dessalines in Dr. J. C. Dorsainvil, Histoire d’Haïti, Cours Supérieur, Port‐au‐Prince, Éditions Henri Deschamps, 132st ed., p. 147. (1st ed. 1934).

2. In French, Spanish, and Portuguese, the word “bossale” is a derogatory expression referring to an African-born person.

3. We will see that after 1804, they called themselves habitants. The rural population of Haiti, formed originally by former enslaved, has been using the French term for settler, i.e. “habitant”, to identify themselves. We will use this term when refering to the rural population. Most authors prefer the expression “peasant.” This choice insinuates that all or most rural dwellers work or should work the land, as the landlords would wish. But this is actually not the case. See Chrichlow’s Negotiating Caribbean Freedom (2005).

4. The “ lakou” is an embrionary reconstruction of the clan and the primary cell of residence within the reorganization of the territory implemented autonomously by the population after Independence. (Casimir, 2009, page 110) Mimose P. Beaubrun (Nan dòmi, le récit d’une initiation Vodou. Paris: Vents d’ailleurs, 2010, page 200) observes with perspicacity : “Le lakou est un espace bien défini. Pourtant les autorités civiles n’ont aucun pouvoir sur cet espace.” (The lakou is a concretely delimited area. Nevertheless, civil authorities have no power over this space).

5. I have suggested that moun could derive from the singular form of bantu, i.e. muntu. Encountering the least bit of disrespect, a Haitian will often say: “M se moun tou!” which could be transcribed as “M se muntu!” or “I am a person.” Nonetheless, the Haitian linguist Michel DeGraff kindly pointed out to me another probable origin of the word from the French monde, used in Canadian French with a similar meaning. He underlined that the Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française (von Watburg, 1960) registers that petit monde and grand monde used to correspond to ti moun and gran moun of today’s Haitian Kreyol.

6. Some of them were born of free parents and could not have been emancipated, but they were still considered and treated as such.

7. “Pinchinat et Augustin Rigaud (leaders des planteurs de couleur) insinuèrent que les hommes de couleur et les noirs étaient les vrais habitants, les vrais propriétaires des colonies, que tout leur appartenait et que les blancs devaient être exterminés et chassés.” (Pinchinat and Augustin Rigaud (leaders of the colored planters) have insinuated . . . that the colored and blacks were the true inhabitants, the real owners of the colonies, that everything belonged to them and that the whites should be exterminated and extradited). “Rapport de Maarec, Secrétaire de la délégation de la Troisième Commission Civile dans le Sud.” See Moral’s Le paysan haïtien, Étude sur la vie rurale en Haïti. (1961), page 352.

8. “And since so much of our cognitive capacity is achieved via language, control of language – the determination of what words mean, who can use what forms of language to what effects in which settings – is power.” See Tolmach Lakoff’s The Language War (2001), page 42.

9. As admitted by his private secretary, President Sudre Dartiguenave (formerly a provincial lawyer who had signed the convention “legalizing” the American Occupation of 1915) had no precise knowledge about the Americans with whom he negotiated. He entrusted himself to a former attorney for the American firm McDonalds, a direct descendant of the pre-1804 “American colonists” who


had been educated abroad and was familiar with the new metropole: “Dartiguenave did not know the Americans. He honestly believed in the promises that were made to him, and persuaded himself that, stabilized in peace, his country would be able to heal its wounds and repair, through work, its long-standing and sad errors.” See Danache’s Le Président Dartiguenave et les Américains (2004), page 46.

10. The cacos were guerillas of the central and northern parts of the Republic fighting the central government when the Americans disembarked. They were the only national force to resolutely oppose foreign intervention.

11. Auguste de Pradines, known as Candio. See Gaillard’s Les Blancs débarquent, Premier Écrasement du Cacoïsme, page 147.

12. The High‐Commissionner Russel wrote that: “(President) Borno has never taken a step without first consulting me. This period (of the American occupation) was, in fact, the only attempt at modernizing the country according to the Western capitalist system, carried out with honesty and perseverance.” François Blancpain, pages 196 and 283.

13. Felix Prudent quotes (page 30) an interesting remark of Moreau de Saint-Méry : “Il (le créole) a aussi son génie . . . et un fait très sûr, c’est qu’un Européen quelque habitude qu’il en ait, quelque longue qu’ait été sa résidence aux Iles, n’en possède jamais les finesses.” The Creole language is not devoid of its peculiarities . . . and one thing is most certain: a European irrespective of her/his familiarity with it, of the length of her/his residence in the Islands, never masters its subteltlies.

14. Claude Moïse notes with irony: “Le protectorat américain reposerait d’abord sur le droit accordé aux États‐Unis d’engager ses forces pour assurer la ‘conservation de l’Indépendance d’Haïti’ contre ‘toute intrusion d’une puissance étrangère quelconque’ (art. I) et pour aider ‘le gouvernemet d’Haïti à supprimer les insurrections intérieures’ (art. II).” [The American protectorate would rest primarily on the right granted to the United States to use military forces to ensure the ‘protection of the Independance of Haiti’ against ‘any intrusion of any foreign power whatsoever’ (art. I) and to help ‘the government of Haiti to suppress internal insurgency’ (art. II).] See Moïse’s Constitutions et Luttes de pouvoir en Haïti, Tome II, 1915‐1987 (1990), page 23.

15. The expression is from Jean‐Jacques Dessalines in the “Proclamation du Général en Chef au peuple d’Haïti” delivered on the 1st of January, 1804. He wrote: “Victimes pendant quatorze ans de notre crédulité et de notre indulgence; vaincus, non par des armées françaises, mais par la pipeuse éloquence des proclamations de leurs agents .” ([We were] victims during fourteen years of our credulity and our indulgence; vanquished, not by the French armies, but by the devious eloquence of the proclamations made by their agents ) Recueil général des lois et des actes du gouvernement d’Haïti (1886).

16. See Casimir’s Haïti et ses élites, l ’ interminable dialogue de sourds (2009).

17. “Mais si l’élite haïtienne est consommatrice de modernisation, elle n’en est pas productrice ou si peu.” (But if the Haitian elite is a consumer of modernisation, it is not a producer of it or it hardly produces any of it.) See Manigat’s Éventail d’Histoire Vivante d’Haïti, Des préludes à la Révolution de Saint-Domingue jusqu’à nos jours (2003), page 12.

18. For an evaluation of the efforts made by this group of intellectuals forced by the U.S. Occupation to elaborate a new self-definition, see Trouillot’s “De quelle Couleur est le Pouvoir” (2010), pages 343–64.

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Haiti’s Need for a Great South

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