The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée”

Abstract

The revolution in France's colony of Saint-Domingue that began in 1791 led to the first complete abolition of slavery in 1793-1794 and to the creation, in 1804, of the independent black nation of Haiti. It also gave birth to a new kind of author: the colonial exile. (1) Violently ousted from their privileged positions, white plantation-owners used their command of literacy to cast themselves as victims of the upheaval that had forced them to flee. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Rousseau had cast themselves as defenders of the oppressed, and, in Rousseau's case, as victims of oppression in their own right; the colonial exiles of the 1790s insisted on their victim status, but did so in order to justify a system of racial hierarchy in which they had held superior status. They used their personal narratives not only to denounce the black insurgents who had destroyed their plantations but also to accuse the French revolutionary politicians who, in the eyes of these authors, had triggered the slave uprising through their utopian fantasies about human rights. Authorship, in these texts, became a mechanism for disseminating a new, more aggressive racism epitomized in a notorious passage of Francois Rene de Chateaubriand's Genie du christianisme, which asked, Qui oserait encore plaider la cause des Noirs apres les crimes qu'ils ont corareis? (2) Paradoxically, however, even as they defended slavery and racial prejudice, the exiled colonists of Saint-Domingue contributed to the development of a form of authorship that would, in the twentieth century, come to be associated with campaigns for human rights and for the right of colonial subjects to speak back to the metropole. These authors, together with their contemporaries who lived through the Revolution in France itself, were among the first in the French tradition to produce examples of what we can call witness literature--first-person accounts of extraordinary public events that had drastically affected their authors' private lives in ways that were assumed to be typical of the fate of large numbers of contemporaries--in French literature. (3) The growing interest in more recent examples of French witness literature, such as the texts of French Holocaust survivors, and in genres such as the testimonio in other languages, (4) suggests the importance of taking a more serious look at the witness literature of the revolutionary era, both as literature and as a source of historical insight. At the same time as they helped inaugurate the tradition of the author as witness to history, the memoirs by colonists from Saint-Domingue anticipated a uniquely Caribbean tradition of exile literature. As Martin Munro has written in his Exile and Post-1946 Literature, Haitian literature has a longstanding, sophisticated tradition of migrant writing, produced by authors driven from their homeland by the threat of violence. The writings of exiles from Haiti and from the Caribbean more generally, whether they mourn for an irrecuperable history or celebrate the beginnings of a new epoch, have shared an essential preoccupation with the effects of exile and displacement on groups and individuals, on historical consciousness, on memory, on sense of place and time, on culture, on language, and on the imagination in general, Munro concludes. (5) The authors Munro has in mind are, of course, twentieth-and twenty-first-century exiles of African ancestry, but his description can also be applied, paradoxically, to the writings of the Caribbean's first wave of exiles, the white colonists driven out of Saint-Domingue during the Revolution, and especially to the remarkable text I discuss here, the anonymous manuscript Mon Odyssee. Authors from Saint-Domingue who lived through the revolt against slavery in France's most important colony make up a small but highly interesting subset of the revolutionary period's writer-witnesses. Despite the colonies' economic importance to France, the events there were by definition peripheral to the metropolitan experience. …