Nous mourrons tous, The Haitian Revolution goes Underground

J Michael Dash

doi:10.16993/karib.47

Abstract

In a lengthy 1967 interview held in Havana with Rene Depestre, Aime Cesaire may have made one of the most unintentionally misleading claims regarding the Haitian revolution when he declared that “the first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians.” Curiously, this interview was never published in French but within a few years became widely available in English in the Anglophone Caribbean and the United States where the words “first negro epic” would have a powerful emotional impact. Paul Breslin in his pursuit of literary representations of the Haitian revolution excuses Cesaire’s choice of the word epic by saying that he used it “in a colloquial sense.” However, I would like to take Cesaire at his word, as it were, and gauge the impact of the word epic on our reconstruction or “unsilencing” of the Haitian past.

Highlights

Je consentirais volontiers à croire que je suis un écrivain de la rue où je suis né à Port-au-Prince, la rue de l’Enterrement, appelée aussi, tenez-vous bien... rue de la Révolution, eh oui je suis né sous le signe de ce gag-là
Back to the Future In a lengthy 1967 interview held in Havana with Rene Depestre, Aime Césaire may have made one of the most unintentionally misleading claims regarding the Haitian revolution when he declared that, “the first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians.”2 (Césaire, 1972: 74) Curiously, this interview was never published in French but within a few years became widely available in English in the Anglophone Caribbean and the United States where the words “first negro epic” would have a powerful emotional impact
As opposed to later anticolonial revolutions in Latin America, Africa and Asia all of which were scripted by radical ideologies, the Haitian revolution was “not accompanied or preceded by an explicit intellectual discourse.” (88) Though he does not develop this idea, he introduces indirectly the notion that this was a radical experience of an irruption into modernity or modernité vécue (“lived modernity” to use Edouard Glissant’s terminology) which caused all certitudes to collapse producing the capacity for radical self-invention. (Glissant, 1997: 435–443)

Summary

Introduction

Je consentirais volontiers à croire que je suis un écrivain de la rue où je suis né à Port-au-Prince, la rue de l’Enterrement, appelée aussi, tenez-vous bien... rue de la Révolution, eh oui je suis né sous le signe de ce gag-là. Jacques Roumain’s iconic novel, Gouverneurs de la rosée, can be read as a Haitian dream text that re-enacts the liberatory dream of country’s revolutionary past but one in which the figure of the protagonist’s mother, tellingly named Délira Délivrance, remains defiantly opaque.

Results

Conclusion