HAITIAN REVOLUTIONARY FICTIONS

Oppression, carnage, and heroism course through writings inspired by the Haitian revolution in this sprawling anthology.

Editors and translators Daut, Pierrot, and Rohrleitner collect more than 200 excerpts of novels, stories, poems, and plays dating from 1787 to 1899 and set during—or touching on—the 13-year revolt of enslaved people who won Haiti its independence from France in 1804. The struggle fed on revolutionary enthusiasms, challenged White supremacy, and included horrific massacres. It also provoked complex responses from writers worldwide, broadly surveyed. Most selections are by Europeans who view the Haitian revolution with mixed feelings. Liberals see it as a beacon of freedom (“Thy friends are exultations, agonies / And love, and man’s unconquerable mind,” rhapsodizes William Wordsworth’s ode to the Haitian general Toussaint Louverture); romantics use it as a setting for adventure stories; and dispossessed French colonists harp on revolutionary terror and exile. Some writers display conflicting impulses; in one excerpt, Victor Hugo emphasizes the nobility of a formerly enslaved person who defends a White family, while in another passage he characterizes Haitians as subhuman. Overall, the writings here often feel overwrought and unwieldy under their burdens of ideology and 19th-century melodrama. Still, readers interested in Haiti and the intersection of literature and politics will find many works engrossing. The Haitian writers, for example, are shown to view the revolution through the lens of liberation: “All that is left is hatred and we only have one rallying cry: death!” declares a rebel to the owners of a plantation house he’s set ablaze in Ignace Nau’s story “An Episode of the Revolution.” Others effectively express patriotism tempered with misgivings: “With his brothers’ blood he stained the history / Of our revolution! / Yet, he was beautiful, when with sword held up high, / He cried out: O sweet liberty, your day is coming nigh!” writes poet Coriolan Ardouin of revolutionary-turned-dictator Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The editors provide extensive biographical notes on each author, and Daut, a professor of African diaspora studies at the University of Virginia, contributes an insightful introduction.

A volume of passionate, if sometimes-stilted, writings rich in historical and scholarly interest.