True Dechoukaj: Uprooting Bovarysme in Post-Duvalier Haiti

Abstract

It would not be an exaggeration to state that David Nicholls took a perverse pleasure in exposing the ways in which Caribbean intellectuals misinterpreted the region’s social and political reality. Given the fact that the Duvalier regime was more than simply a reign of terror, he was quick to point out that many anti-Duvalier intellectuals “underestimated—sometimes to their own cost—the degree of popular support (or at least benevolent neutrality) enjoyed by Duvalier” (1985, p. 34). It was not just the ideologically blinkered Haitian intellectuals who came under sharp criticism. He was particularly keen on deflating the illusions of the Left in the Caribbean. He warns at the end of Haiti in Caribbean Context that “political strategies which assume the existence of a revolutionary working class or peasantry in the Antilles are bound to come to grief” (ibid., p. 238). This pattern is already evident in From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti. Nicholls, in his conclusion to this classic study of Haitian society and politics, took a swipe at Frantz Fanon whose theory of the importance of violence in the process of decolonization was being blindly applied to the Caribbean by leftist thinkers in the sixties.