Island People by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Author:Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

The words are some of Haiti’s best known.

The God of the whites pushes them to crime, but ours wants good deeds.

That God who is so good orders us to vengeance.

He will direct our hands, give us help.6

This was the poem with which Boukman is said to have launched the summit-cum-ceremony held here on August 14, 1791. Of course Boukman left no written record of his speech. He was also soon killed by the fighting his words launched—what exactly he said is unknown. What isn’t unknown is that a week after that first gathering, attendees of Boukman’s rites effected a revolt—planned brilliantly in secret, and prosecuted with deadly efficiency—that brought down Saint-Domingue.

On the night of August 21 and the one following, slaves across the northern plain moved on their masters’ homes. They torched the source of their misery, and the terrified screams of their owners launched a war whose beginning’s details we know of thanks largely to a mulatto journalist from Port-au-Prince who in 1824 traveled north to record those people’s memories of Haiti’s revolution. It seems that Hérard Dumesle’s rendering of Boukman’s words, which he wrote down after that trip, were as likely born of the writer’s mind as from anything he took down from an informant who was actually present at Bois Caiman in 1791. But like the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, these words’ veracity and source matter less than how they’ve lived on. In Haiti, it’s not at all uncommon to enter a conversation about current politics that ends up being a discussion of the minute details of some not-forgotten double cross or intrigue from the age of Boukman. Here where “Haitians walk in history,” as one of their essential modern chroniclers put it, the tension between history as it’s written and history as it’s lived is ever present.7 And as Etienne and I again reached the main clearing in Bois Caiman, my host in his Cross Colours T-shirt, accepted the crumpled bill I put in his palm and smiled farewell.

“Sa a se kote Ayiti te fèt,” he said. “Out 14, 1791”—This is where Haiti was born, on August 14, 1791.

* * *

AND SO IT WAS. In a sense. The date to which historians peg Haiti’s independence, and on whose anniversary Haitians eat pumpkin soup to mark it, came thirteen years after Boukman’s fire. It was on January 1, 1804, at the end of a very long and bloody and complex war, that General Jean-Jacques Dessalines constituted a new state whose name was borrowed from the Taino. The war at whose end he did so had not only pitted Dessalines and comrades like his mentor, Toussaint L’Ouverture, against successive invasions by the French and Spanish and English, but also against each other. It finally ended with Haiti’s founding, in 1804. But Etienne’s assertion wasn’t inaccurate, either.

For it was perhaps at Bois Caiman that the nation of Haiti—the larger community forged with the Kreyol melding of French vocabulary to Fon syntax and through a vodou faith that joined the gods of Kongo and Dahomey into a new pantheon—was born.

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