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On October 17, Haiti commemorates the assassination of its revolutionary hero and
first head of state, Jean-Jacques Dessalines (ca. 1758-1806). Haiti dignifies no
other individual with an official national holiday. Haiti’s
The complexities and amazing extremes of this slave-to-emperor’s biography cannot be separated from the extraordinary times and place in which he lived. It would not be hyperbole to proclaim that the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the most signal and transformative event in the Age of Revolution. Saint-Domingue’s astounding journey from a French sugar colony of nearly a half million enslaved to an independent black nation is a convoluted tale. With the slave uprising, the colony erupted into battles that fell along economic and racial fault lines. At one point there were as many as six factions warring at once, with alliances formed and dissolved in rapid succession between the various groups: rich white planters, poorer white laborers, French troops trying to restore order in the colony, the opportunistic armies of England and Spain, free persons of color (most of mixed-race ancestry, “mulattos”), and the enslaved majority with its own internal divisions between African and Creole born. During the long years of fighting, most sides at one point courted the rebel blacks with offers to arm and then to emancipate. A “born soldier,” Dessalines became known as a courageous fighter and a fear- and fealty-inspiring commander in his own right. He ascended rapidly through the ranks, becoming a key and indefatigable general under the famous Toussaint L’Ouverture, fighting for the royalist Spanish army, then for the French republican army fighting against the Spanish and British. In 1799, Toussaint entrusted Dessalines with putting down a civil war, which has been typically understood as a conflict between mulattos in the south against the blacks, who were aided by a U.S. Navy blockade. With the revolts crushed, Toussaint needed to stabilize the black armies and eliminate officers and soldiers loyal to his rival, the defeated southern leader Andre Rigaud. Dessalines’s reprisals led to many executions, to which Toussaint is said to have chastised, “I said to prune the tree, not to uproot it.” Some scholars have suggested, however, that Toussaint had ordered these killings but had his generals take responsibility in order to keep his hands and reputation (relatively) clean (James 236; Dubois 236). Regardless of the veracity of the claims of such political underworkings, the war’s events have allowed most histories to treat Dessalines as Toussaint’s brutal foil.
Nonetheless, Dessalines was the soldier that the battlefield and times necessitated, a general willing to see plainly what was needed and not hesitating to respond accordingly if bluntly. Military expediency, not diplomacy, distinguished Dessalines. After Toussaint’s capture and deportation in 1802, Dessalines deemed that the war was now a revolution for total independence rather than colonial autonomy with emancipation. And he succeeded in completing history’s most successful slave revolt, leading the colony to national independence, though Haiti’s subsequent instabilities have and continue to call into question how well this dream was achieved. Historian Laurent Dubois’s cogent assessment of Toussaint just as easily applies to Dessalines: “Though his ultimate inability to construct a multiracial, egalitarian, and democratic society in Saint-Domingue might strike us as particularly tragic, given his origins, this was a failure he shared with the leaders of every other postemancipation society in the Atlantic world” (174).
History and legend link Dessalines with several signal acts in the birth of this
first modern independent black nation. In May 1803, he tore the white band from the
French
Dessalines’s meteoric rise from abject slave to iron-fisted emperor willing to preserve his fledgling nation’s freedom by any means necessary seems only fit to engender an even more dramatic downfall. Dessalines’s despotism, draconian labor policies, and enforced land reform plans soon disillusioned the peasants, fair-skinned elite landowners, and military alike. On October 17, 1806, Dessalines’s soldiers ambushed their leader and rendered his body to pieces. Legends state that the madwoman Défilée, possibly Dessalines’s spurned lover and a sutler to his troops, gathered, buried, and guarded the emperor’s remains in a final act of restorative devotion.
At his death, Dessalines was both torn asunder and repaired. His complex legacy suffered a similar fate. Over two centuries of Haitian, European and U.S. American popular representations of Dessalines reconstruct this leader, though often by eliminating his contradictions, thus rendering his complex legacy piecemeal. Haiti’s revolutionary heroes, especially the black triumvirate of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, are important not only in political histories but also cultural storytelling. And not surprisingly, their biographical narratives are often conflicting and depend greatly on who is enacting the telling. In this essay, I will examine some of the many ways that popular representations of Dessalines have shaped his legacy—politically, creatively and ritualistically. I will begin with an overview of representations of the demonic Dessalines, which continued into the twentieth century, particularly during the U.S. Occupation of Haiti. Next, I will outline how African-American writers in particular have recovered Dessalines as a dramatic and powerful black hero, though one unburdened from his more extreme actions. I will conclude my discussion with the Haitian folk religion of Vodou, which is one of the few spaces that recognizes and celebrates the contradictory nature of this mercurial figure.
Early Haitian histories with accounts of Dessalines largely do not appear until around the mid-nineteenth century, during the waning years of the Revolutionary generation and a growing economic divide that tended to fall along color distinctions. These written accounts were largely put forward by the economically and politically powerful educated mulatto elite who, perhaps not surprisingly, privileged mulatto revolutionary leaders like André Rigaud over black leaders like Dessalines and Christophe. Historian David Nicholls gives one of the most comprehensive meditations on the divide between racial and color identities within Haitian culture and its importance in the construction of its history for political purposes. He notes, “Mulatto historians developed a whole legend of the past, according to which the real heroes of Haitian independence were the mulatto leaders…. The black leaders were portrayed as either wicked or ignorant, and the legend was clearly designed to reinforce the subjugation of the masses and the hegemony of the mulatto elite” (11; see also 85-101).
These early Haitian historians who chose to demonize Dessalines found good company with an already established and ever increasing body of European and U.S. accounts that established the vocabulary and interpretive lens through which this founding father and all of Haiti would be judged: African savage, diabolical, inhuman, ferocious, base and sanguinary, cruel and brutal, vain and capricious, lustful and insatiable (Barskett; Chazotte; Dubroca, Franklin; Harvey). In his literary analysis of narratives of the Haitian Revolution, Matt Clavin argues that the ubiquitous published histories and biographies that circulated throughout the nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic world commodified the Haitian Revolution and its principal actors. This flood of writing captured the attention of and titillated a growing boom of readers in a competitive literary market. Clavin argues that this was accomplished through the use of standard literary techniques, especially the conventions of Gothic literature, such as crumbling and exotic scenery, characters seemingly outside the bounds of Enlightenment rationality, and, above all, descriptions of “indescribable” violent and brutal acts (14-29). Dessalines provided the most direct and titillating example of exotic barbarity, the Enlightenment turned on its head but corrected with the equally brutal downfall of the black emperor, an example of horrific history that far outpaced Gothic fiction and found an eager audience.
Not surprisingly, these numerous accounts of the Haitian Revolution can also be sorted based on the ideologies of their authors: abolitionist or pro-slavery. Abolitionist accounts tended to diminish the role of Dessalines in lieu of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who in turn was presented as gentle, educated, Christian and compromising. Captured and deported before the extremely brutal final revolutionary period, where both sides waged a desperate war of extermination, Toussaint as martyr could become a positive symbol of black potential and enlightened character. What the Abolitionists downplayed, the pro-slavery side sought to exploit: Dessalines’s killings, portrayed as the sanguinary finale of blacks’ mercurial treachery, served as the shining example of the disasters that awaited sudden and complete emancipation. Pierre Etienne [Peter Stephen] Chazotte, who claimed to be one of the few eyewitnesses to survive Dessalines’s ordered massacre of French whites in 1804, published an English translation of his experiences in 1840, based, as he claimed, on notes he had written during the events. His work was meant to discredit what he saw as the abolitionist lies particularly propagated by the English. For Chazotte, Dessalines was a mindless executioner, a puppet of the English Wilberforce Society (41, 48, 69). Over several detailed pages, Chazotte regaled his readers with his direct observations of the executions (46-51), adding voyeuristic passages of pathos for the killings in the night that he overheard but did not see from his guarded residence: “Cries of murder, defiance, despair, rage, and vociferations, intermixed with the groans and lamentations of the wounded and the dying, resounded through the whole place” (50). Chazotte used his narrative to produce a damning account of the English as the main force who spurred the barbaric yet simplistic blacks towards violence, while also concluding that this merely shows the imitative nature of all persons of African descent and that a modern self-rule was well beyond Haitians’ capabilities.
Building upon earlier descriptions like Chazotte’s, the British Minister Resident to Haiti Sir Spenser St. John wrote the most popular and widely circulated of nineteenth-century descriptions of Haiti’s history and religion,
Five years later and in direct response to damning revelations of the U.S. Occupation’s financial and military abuses, the December 1920
Importantly, the information within this article was gathered during Johnston’s
six-month trip through the Caribbean and United States in 1908-9,
What these outside observers failed to acknowledge, however, was that the honoring of
Dessalines had and continued to be rigorously deliberated by the Haitian elite. The
beginnings of the official recovery of Dessalines began in the 1840s. As the
revolutionary generation passed away, Dessalines’s legacy was rehabilitated enough to
allow for a modest grave marker, and an even more modest pension for his aging widow.
In 1861, Haitian newspapers heatedly debated a proposal for the creation of a
monument to Dessalines. As historian David Nicholls has pointed out, Haitians chose
sides in this “acute controversy” based on political and racial allegiances; blacks
and those espousing a
Dessalines’s statue and rehabilitated legacy continued to prove malleable. Posed high
on a pedestal, Johnston’s photograph (c. 1908-9) shows Dessalines stepping stiffly
forward and holding aloft a saber in his right hand, and a scabbard in the left,
which Johnston identified as an excessive second sword (“Haiti” 496) [fig. 1].
Dessalines braces a painted metal national flag permanently unfurled with the
national motto, “Liberty or Death!” and “To die rather than be under the domination
of Power.”
While nearly every history outlines Dessalines’s fierce and brutal character, there are very few contemporary descriptions of what he physically looked like. ‘A short, stout Black,’ seems to be the most thorough description left and no likenesses taken from life have been authenticated (Heinl 126). Rather, a range of likenesses from nineteenth-century engravings abound, with a few becoming privileged, and one accepted as a correct representation by state-sponsored commissions in the twentieth century: the portrait of Dessalines from the series of paintings displayed in the national palace,
Perceptions of Dessalines’s character proved even more malleable than his image.
Dessalines expected and embraced the fact that the greater world would find him
horrific and blood thirsty. The January 1, 1804 declaration of independence was
proclaimed before a crowd at Gonaïves. It is clear, however, that Dessalines and his
secretary, an educated officer of color named Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre who
authored and read the proclamation on Dessalines’s behalf, understood the
proclamation’s audience to include not only the new citizens of Haiti, but also the
greater international community. The declaration rebukes Haiti’s new black citizens
for failing to avenge their dead by allowing some French to still remain in the
country. The elimination of these French would serve not only as the final step in
completing the war of emancipation, it would also ensure that no remaining foreigner
would continue to plot “to trouble and divide us” (Dubois and Garrigus 189). More
importantly, Dessalines/Boisrond-Tonnerre prods that a final act of massacre would
send the most dramatic message possible to dissuade France and any other power that
this fledgling nation could ever be reclaimed for slavery: …know that you have
done nothing if you do not give the nations a terrible, but just example of the
vengeance that must be wrought by a people proud to have recovered its liberty and
jealous to maintain it. Let us frighten all those who would dare try to take it
from us again; let us begin with the French. Let them tremble when they approach
our coast, if not from the memory of those cruelties they perpetrated here, then
from the terrible resolution that we will have made to put to death anyone born
French whose profane foot soils the land of liberty (Dubois and Garrigus
189).
Importantly, in the declaration’s closing lines, Dessalines also claimed his
own legacy: “Recall that my name horrifies all those who are slavers, and that
tyrants and despots can only bring themselves to utter it when they curse the day I
was born…” (Arthur and Dash 44). In April 1804, following the actual killings of the
remaining French planters, Dessalines proclaimed: ‘We have rendered to these
true cannibals, war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. Yes, I have
saved my country; I have avenged America. The avowal I make in the face of earth
and heaven, constitutes my pride and my glory. Of what consequence to me is the
opinion which contemporary and future generations will pronounce upon my conduct?
I have performed my duty; I enjoy my own approbation: for me that is sufficient’
(Barskett 183).
Dessalines carefully posited his acts against a history
of the French slave system notorious for its excessive cruelties, tortures and rapes,
and he orchestrated the executions to be a signal to the greater world of an
unrepentant blackness that grounded the newly created Haitian identity.
Amazingly, despite his extreme rhetoric and actions, Dessalines’s character lent itself not only to disparaging accounts, but also dramatic and even morally uplifting representations. Since there are few records of Dessalines’s own accounting of his thoughts and actions, his life has been used as a blank canvas for more romantic inscriptions. Indeed, given how he proclaimed his own legacy, Dessalines probably would have been shocked by the numerous representations that attempt to sanitize his legacy, especially those examples put forth by fellow blacks. Several prominent African-American writers have attempted to recover a revolutionary hero without the accrued weight of his harsher actions. In 1863, former slave William Wells Brown published
Three decades later, African-American publisher and activist William Edgar Easton out-distanced Brown’s positive portrayal in his play
Indeed, the debut staging of Easton’s interpretation of Haiti’s history was actually about the visibility and control of African-American self-presentation.
Prominent twentieth-century African-American writers continued Easton’s belief in racial uplift through black historical drama, with Haiti frequently providing exciting material and inspiring heroic figures. And like Easton before them, those who staged their work around Dessalines as their lead character did so by ignoring the more contradictory and violent aspects of his actions. For example, writer and linguist John Matheus wrote the libretto to the opera
Famed writer Langston Hughes also had an abiding fascination with Haiti, its revolutionary history, and the character of Dessalines. In February 1928, Hughes began work on an opera on the Haitian Revolution, first sketched as a “singing play” entitled
In one final example of Dessalines’s extreme sanitization at the hands of African-American writers, Helen Webb Harris composed
These African-American writers portrayed Dessalines as a simplified and somewhat
thuggish saint. Interestingly, within the Haitian folk religion of Vodou, Dessalines
actually has become a saint. Vodou is a highly syncretic, African-derived, complex
New World religion that has vibrantly adapted (and continues to adapt) to the needs
and struggles of Haitians. Like Dessalines, this much maligned religion has been
distilled in the popular imagination outside of Haiti in the form of a highly
circumscribed stereotype. The religion is known more popularly by the moniker
“voodoo”; histories, sensationalized travelogues, and, especially, horror films
present “voodoo” as a demonic, brutal, and blood- and zombie-driven cult of death and
debauchery. While many Haitians believe in a single supreme God, they also believe in
a pantheon of intermediary spirit-saints, or
Vodou rituals involve what religious scholar Karen McCarthy Brown has termed “performance-possession”: the dramatic moment when a Vodou spirit possesses (or mounts) an adherent (
All manifestations of Ogou poignantly model the constructive and destructive uses of power. Brown has described the ritual dance performed by those possessed by Ogou. First, Ogou takes a ritual sword and wields it against an invisible enemy. Before long, however, his aggressive swipes and jabs become directed towards people present at the ceremony. Finally, Ogou turns the sword upon himself. Ogou performs the paradox at the center of Haitian military and political history, where leaders heralded as heroes have time and again turned upon their own people while also instigating their own destruction (
Historian Joan Dayan has provided one of the most extensive analyses of Dessalines’s
leap from revolutionary leader to
Within Vodou, remembered histories possess the power to shape and interact with contemporary problems. The worship of Ogou Desalin performs an important revolutionary history and embodies contemporary relationships with power structures. Ogou Desalin shows that liberation is never complete, while teaching that the most powerful can be the most vulnerable and vice versa. Ogou Desalin also shows that power in general is always corruptible, and that the dispossessed must always be wary of whom they call hero. Rendered to pieces at his death, Dessalines’s spirit and legacy has only grown more powerful as representations continuously reconstitute, rework and repair this mercurial hero. Most popular representations circumscribe him to the space of either demon or saint. Vodou, however, provides a model that accepts and even finds necessary Dessalines’s equivocal nature.
*Acknowledgments: Initial research that led to this article was made possible through the support of the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies’ Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, 2004-2005 and was presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference in 2006. Research for its completion was enabled by support from the Augustana Research and Artist Fund of Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD, and an A. Bartlett Giamatti Fellowship from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Yale University.