“I Need Many Repetitions”: Rehearsing the Haitian Revolution in the Shadows of the Sugar Mill

Abstract

At the threshold of colonial Saint-Domingue and the republic of Haiti lies the story of Bois Caiman. Multiple variants of the story all tell of summer night in 1791, when enslaved and maroon Black men and women gathered in the Caiman woods to plan revolt against the colonial slave system. The meeting involved religious ceremony led by Boukman Dutty and an unnamed mambo to serve the spirits and fortify the commitment to revolt. 1 Within few days, the sugarcane fields of Saint-Domingue's northern provinces were ablaze, the processing machinery wrecked, and the owners dead or fleeing. The uprising left the economic heart of the world's most brutally profitable colony in what C. L. R. James describes as a flaming ruin, one that would burn for nearly thirteen years before culminating in the declaration of the free Black Republic of Haiti (88). Competing historical narratives have proliferated around the Bois Caiman ceremony: as part of narrative of lost possession for French contemporaries, the ceremony was denigrated as savagery and witchcraft; as part of narrative of freedom for Haitians, the ceremony was celebrated as the origins of revolution whose signal achievement—the establishment of free republic—would presage future Pan-African and Pan-American liberation movements. 2 In the last few decades, the story of Bois Caiman has been recast by minority of evangelicals as scene in the unfolding drama between God and Satan on cosmic stage. 3 For these Haitian and United States evangelicals, Bois Caiman represents not signal achievement but rather an originary catastrophe, in which Boukman calls on pagan spirits to free the enslaved in exchange for the future nation's loyalty, prompting the devil to draw up contract for Haiti's soul. 4 And it is this demonic possession of Haiti that, for these evangelicals, guarantees all that follows, casting the 2010 earthquake and its long-term devastation as just the latest evidence that Haiti, since its conception, has embodied spiritual, social, and economic catastrophe without end. 5