Representing Haiti: Postcolonial Discourse and Aimé Césaire's La tragédie du roi Christophe

Abstract

IN An inteRview with chARLes RoweLL in 1989, Aime Cesaire frames his representation of Haiti's King Henry Christophe in the following terms:The difference between my 'vision' of Christophe and that of my predecessors is that they see only the ridicule, the Bourgeois gentilhomme aspect, the 'Negro vanity' aspect that abounded in the white racist and colonialist literature. But I want people to go beyond this. What I mean is that behind Christophe's ridicule there is something pathetic, and it is this pathos that European historians never perceive. It is the pathetic dimension of a man who comes out of slavery and wants to raise his people, and raises himself to an extraordinary kind of mystique. He uses all the means available to him in his time; but these means were not always the best ones.1Cesaire's representation of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, and his attempts to humanise Henry Christophe in La tragedie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe)2 and to debunk the Eurocentric discourse to which he alludes, are all too clear in the above excerpt from the interview. His literary vehicle - the dramatic genre - is deliberate and crucial to our understanding and appreciation of the play. He recasts Christophe as a tragic figure, a persona that redeems him from the ridiculous king of history books, and thus prepares the reader/audience for pathos, fear, admiration, fate, death, and inevitability, which are necessary ingredients of a tragedy.3 playwright expressed his pride, interest, and respect vis-a-vis in another interview with Rene Depestre:After my discovery of the North American Negro and my discovery of Africa, I went on to explore the totality of the black world, and that is how I came upon the history of Haiti. I love Martinique, but it is an alienated land, while represented for me the heroic Antilles, the African Antilles. I began to make connections between the Antilles and Africa, and is the most African of the Antilles. It is at the same time a country with a marvellous history: the first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians, people like Toussaint l'Ouverture, Henri Christophe, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, etc. is not very well known in Martinique.4To argue that the first Negro epic was written by men like Louverture, Christophe and Dessalines, not only qualifies the play as an epic, but also endows these revolutionaries with heroic qualities. In his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Cesaire proclaims as an embodiment of and a precursor to Negritude ideology when he writes, in reference to the Haitian Revolution, Haiti [is] where Negritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in its humanity5 - an indication that Negritude encompasses more than a literary and an aesthetic phenomenon.The Tragedy of King Christophe bears resemblance to metadrama,6 in that it is self-reflexive and its characters are conscious of their theatricality, of being on stage. As Christophe's secretary Vastey aptly points out, The whole world is watching us, citizens, and the nations think black men have no dignity (1.2, 18). thus represents the stage on which the drama of the challenges of decolonisation and nation-building is played out; and Christophe stand in for more than a geographic location and an individual. As Cesaire asserts in reference to another historico-political drama of his, A Season in the Congo, Lumumba is not the man Patrice Lumumba; he is, before everything else, a symbol of a man, a man that identifies with Congolese reality and with Africa of decolonisation, an individual that represents a collectivity.7 Christophe and Haiti, then, become prototypes and symbols of black emancipation, and a blueprint for the task inherent in nation-building in post-emancipation/independence nations in the black Atlantic world. deployment of metadramatic techniques has prompted critics to stipulate that the play characterises as a theatre state. …