Thinking Haiti
Laurent Dubois , Coordinator
The project of Jean Casimir is to think Haiti, and to think with and through Haiti about the categories that simultaneously produce its difficulties and limit our comprehension of them. Through his many books, most famously his vital La cultura oprimida (published in Mexico in 1980 and in Haiti as La culture opprimée in 2001), he has produced writings that bring together sociological analysis, historical narrative and interpretation, and theoretical intervention, driven by political urgency and the urgency of transforming the politics of knowledge. These include De la sociología regional a la acción política; un ejemplo latinoamericano a study on North-eastern Brazil published in 1970, La Caraïbe: Une et divisible (Port-au-Prince, Haïti: Imprimerie Deschamps, 1991) – translated as The Caribbean: One and Divisible (Santiago, Chile: 1992) – La Invención del Caribe (San Juan, P.R.: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997), and the bilingual French-Kréyol text Pa Bliyé 1804 (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: 2004). The writing of these works have gone hand-in-hand with fifteen years of work with the United Nations Secretariat, particularly the Economic Commission for Latin America, as well as service as the Haitian Ambassador to the United States during the years of Aristide’s brief first term as President of Haiti and his exile in the United States.
Haiti’s history provides a rich terrain for understanding both the ongoing power of colonial categories and the alternatives that are available to us. The “jewel” of the French empire of the eighteenth century, the most productive colony in the Americas of the period, was unmade and re-invented through a revolution of the enslaved. An incredible military and political victory, this revolution was also a remarkable act of imagination, proposing and enacting a new order, based on the ashes of plantation slavery. And yet, as Casimir has shown us throughout his work, the colonial plantation world has in many ways continued to shape post-independence Haiti, nourishing conflicts and creating a political and economic context within the country that has led to ongoing, and wrenching, difficulties, in the 20th century and now into the 21st century.
But Haiti was always also shaped and constrained by the relentless hostility of the empires and nations that surrounded in the 19th century. One of the many forms of exile and isolation it suffered has been a certain kind of intellectual quarantine, in which the many writings and contributions of Haitian scholars have remained too-little read and known outside of the country. In part this has been the result of language barriers – and the value of Casimir’s work is that it has circulated in four languages (Spanish, English, French and Kréyol) – but there is more to it than that. Although Haitian intellectuals were in constant dialogue with French thinkers (most famously, perhaps, in Anténor Firmin’s response to racist “science”), French intellectuals engaged with Haiti surprisingly little. Indeed, Jacques Chirac once claimed, during a visit to the Caribbean, that Haiti had never been a French colony! In the United States, meanwhile, generations of thinkers did engage directly with Haiti, during the 19th century when Frederick Douglass was ambassador to Haiti, again during the U.S. military occupation of Haiti when African-American leaders spoke out against the occupation. It is through this link that Haiti has been most discussed and debated within the United States. In the process, though, some of the complexities and internal conflicts within Haiti have sometimes been overlooked or at least insufficiently analyzed. That is another value of Casimir’s work – that it allows us a clear-eyed, often discouraging but always incisive, look at the profound difficulties of realizing political and social change and beyond.
In this dossier, Casimir presents a series of interventions that exemplify the range and possibilities opened up by his thought. First, he presents key chapters from La cultura oprimida, with a new introduction looking back on the text’s publication after 25 years. How should we translate the concept of la cultura oprimida? As Casimir pointed out to me in a recent exchange of messages, my impulse to translate the term as “the culture of the oppressed” misses the point. Casimir is speaking about an “oppressed culture” or “a culture under siege”: “a set of knowledge and corresponding institutions” that finds itself “constantly under attack by the modern (plantation) vision of the world.” As he puts it in his introduction, his articulation of the concept is meant to highlight the existence of “a choice between the vision of the conquerors and that of the conquered, which American Social Science has to make.” The goal of such Social Science, he argues, should be “to discover how the dominated can recuperate their history.”
Casimir refuses and critiques reigning visions of the history of Haiti, emphasizing the uniqueness of the experience that produced the country and defending the choice of the refusal embodied in the revolt of the enslaved against the plantation that produced it. “There is no universal history that Haiti should have borrowed,” he insists in his essay, “Le planteur avait une esclave, ma grand-mère était une captive,” which reflects on the complex history of the “peopling of Haiti.” And the mistake of many Haitian thinkers, he suggests, has been to fail to conceive of Haiti from within the political project of the oppressed that produced it.
As he emphasizes in his essay, “Saint-Domingue et Haïti dans le monde moderne,” the peoples of the Caribbean “were not conquered,” but rather “emerged in the heart of established empires, inventing themselves and being reborn constantly while differentiating themselves from the modern states on the other side of the Atlantic.” He seeks to bring together an understanding of all the formative elements of Caribbean, and specifically Haitian culture: the “production” of the slaves through the plantation and a lawless colonial state, the transformation of a “multitude of deportees” into a somewhat unified whole through the force of colonial racism, and, centrally, the mass revolution that emerged in Saint-Domingue and created the Haitian state. He points out in “Haïti et sa créolité” that Haiti was the only colony to transform itself from an “exploitation colony” into a “settlement colony.” During the 19th century, a period when agricultural production of coffee and other crops actually outran that of the colony of Saint-Domingue at certain points, the oppressed culture took root and created a space for itself within Haiti.
But it was always under siege, both from the outside and within at the hands of certain elites. Conscious of the depth of this rupture, his work nevertheless emphasizes the important continuities between the colonial state and post-independence Haiti, and the ongoing continuities between the colonial vision of the eighteenth century and the organization of knowledge in the present. It is this latter point that he emphasizes in “Haiti et ses élites: L’interminable dialogue de sourds,” lamenting the layering incomprehension that he argues has and continues to exist between those who have sought to analyze Haiti and the intellectual and theoretical perspectives embodied in the “oppressed culture” of Haiti itself. He concludes with a mixture of despair and glimpsed hope. He notes that Haiti’s “solitude” in the midst of a world still run by the plantation order “defines it” and seems “inevitable.” The revolutionaries who created the nation understood, though their slogan “Vivre livre ou mourir!” – “To live free or die” – that it might be necessary to die to be free, but they also hoped that it would be possible for Haiti to live free. That option, laments Casimir, seems today to be “annulled.” But a careful confrontation and working through of the past’s tear through the present might make it possible “to build a world in which other worlds will remain possible.”