In my estimation, the wonder that lies in existentialist thought manifests itself as a truthful, naked encounter with actuality, and with it, an appraisal—in no matter kind it comes—of the situation of human existence. Because of this, I come to this overview essay bearing, because it have been, the complete weight of my Caribbeanity, which my Jamaicanness centrally kinds however doesn’t exhaust. Certainly, how might it, when the colonial (and subsequent postcolonial) historical past of the Caribbean has all the time been certainly one of a collective tailoring—a suturing of seemingly scattered items of land, so as to make a collective entire, for both the ends of collective regress or collective progress?
It’s exactly from this place of the Caribbean topic that I critically write about and assume alongside Jean Casimir in his vibrantly history-charting, The Haitians: A Decolonial History, which is the latest winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Excellent Guide in Caribbean Thought. Towards this backdrop, one can’t assist however cite, and maybe, if such an area can exist right here, grieve, the present, ongoing circumstances of Haiti—its ever-mounting social and political upheavals. Listed below are some details on the bottom, towards which we could wrestle:
I lay these details naked to not caricature Haiti, as is trendy in Euro-American discourses, the place, within the white imaginary, Haiti lives on as solely a cautionary metaphor—a foreshadowing—that Haitians will eternally relaxation within the penumbra of wreck and rue their very existence. The adage that too simply rolls off the lips of many neocolonialists, the place Haiti is branded usually as “the poorest nation within the Western hemisphere,” is not any unintended coinage however a results of what I might name discursive assassination. Therefore, I write not in however profoundly towards that colonial vein of thought that may solely view Haiti as an emblem for black failure ever since 1804.
However, if one have been to take significantly accountability for actuality, as a phenomenological crucial, it should imply that partaking Casimir’s decolonial historical past of Haiti requires taking inventory of its ongoing neocolonial histories of the current so as to get to decolonial histories of the longer term. For these causes, the aforementioned statistical actuality just isn’t a results of Haitian malfeasance, because the Euromodern narratives would announce at each globalist microphone, however quite a results of continued Haitian violation, victimization, and vilification. It’s value quoting Casimir at size, in his prefatory notes:
Originally of the twenty-first century, the Haitian inhabitants confronts main difficulties in attempting to occupy the little world through which they like to their satisfaction. It has all the time been this manner. This inhabitants’s supposed poverty, and the low ranges of what the Western world calls schooling, should not the reason for this. The best success it has achieved—liberation from slavery, and independence—didn’t depend upon this schooling, or on the values and ideas of the Western world. In keeping with this world’s requirements, it comprised on the time—and nonetheless includes—the poorest and most abject human group within the universe. However regardless of this quite unflattering evaluation, previously and within the current, the circumstances imposed on the Haitian folks have by no means overcome their will to dwell and to proceed to battle towards the winds and the tides to defend their decisions. (2020: xviii)
Subsequently, The Haitians provides a searing reckoning of Haiti’s previous and current, with a positive, sedimented pathway for a renewed, decolonial futurity. What makes the textual content distinctive is its historicizing of its revolutionary topics. Quite than starting with the lazy, a priori designation of “slave” and even, in its extra enlightened formulation of “enslaved,” Casimir begins not within the European tongue, however in linguistic ontology of the African topic: bossale. Grammar issues. This nomenclature is crucial in understanding the epistemologies of bondage and freedom. On the bossale, Casimir writes:
The previous of the bossales—the African-born enslaved who have been the bulk in Saint-Domingue—is often missed… They weren't born into slavery, and they didn't dwell as slaves. They have been enslaved via intense torture, via revolting abuse and types of humiliation which can be a shame to humanity. How can we clarify the blindness on the a part of all chroniclers, each French and Haitian, who conceive of the historical past of the nation as beginning with slaves, quite than with captives? As soon as they have been captured, the captives needed to be transformed into slaves, and this transformation was not instantaneous. (2020: 8–9)
This is a vital flip within the historicizing of enslavement, one which pays homage to African indigeneity and restores company to black “captives” who have been racialized for the throes of enslavement. Definitely, the transfer is to not refute the slavery of blacks however to resuscitate African agential capability within the midst of slave-making, each as types of resistance and a praxis of humanist retrieval. Casimir’s historic hermeneutics raises modern questions on ongoing discourses on black carceral subjectivities.
At the moment, one might argue that the mass incarceration of blacks operates as a re-enactment of the previous slavocratic order. Casimir’s historic remedy of the enslaved captives as “prisoners,” and the planters as “master-jailer” (318). Subsequently, in analyzing Haiti’s decolonial historical past, Casimir spotlights the continuity of previous colonial practices and centralizes the dialectic of seize as a basis for the emergence of Western modernity. The seize of Haiti was each a query of histography, geography, and physiognomy—of the previous, the land, and the physique. Subsequently, the relation between the colonial as being predicated on captive imaginaries delimits the ontological view from which to completely view Haitian revolutionary praxis.
Take, as an illustration, Casimir’s argument that “[a]s lengthy as histography imprisons itself within the paradigm of European modernity, it validates the concept the colonized are savages… Historic sociology just isn’t a means of studying a selected historical past on the idea of accepted sociological theories. It isn’t about making use of these theories to the precise historiography of the colonized nation. The unit of research in all sociology stays the social relation, the hyperlink between teams and their members located in a selected place and time” (24). Half and parcel of Casimir’s decolonizing venture, because it orbits the principal matter of Haitian civilizational progress, is an unambiguous reinvention of the very indexes and heuristics inside which to learn and interpret the historic and sociological details themselves. Put one other means, Casimir, true to the tactic of Fanonian psychoanalysis, diagnoses each social illiteracy and historic lying as being constitutive components of colonial modernity. The colonial value that’s leveled towards Haiti is a methodological pauperism that impoverishes trendy imaginaries.
As such, there’s a decolonizing of methodology in The Haitians so as to arrive on the artistic, generative capability of the Haitian folks to world-make and self-create. And so, it isn’t tautological to restate that this decolonial praxis of self-making made the Revolution revolutionary, in radically reinventing a brand new grammar of being (and of being black). This latter transfer is essential as a result of such a grammar of blackness, although novel to the New World, already shaped the epistemic structure of the bossales’ existence—a free life previous to captivity.
Subsequently, the query of sovereignty, the relation between the folks and the state, strikes on the coronary heart of the textual content. But that in style sovereignty turns into negotiated between itself and French colonization, which led to what Casimir calls a “rupture”—a suspension of the folks’s political and civil rights (35). Nonetheless, each lever of the colonial equipment elicited an ongoing anti-colonial response, a collective contestation of colonial regimes of energy. Such contests exhibit a transparent occasion of fashioning another, decolonial symbolic universe.
However, the longitudinal results of French colonization led to a calcified manifestation of Haitian oligarchs, each colonial (property-owners) and creole (cultivators), who paved the way in which for colonialism inside Haiti following the assassination of Haitian revolutionary figurehead, Dessalines. Bureaucratization of the nation took root, in all its manifold administrative specificities, and devolved into colonial officialdom, overrepresented as if it have been the sovereign state itself.
The hubris of the colonial administration ceded solution to a totalizing impulse that ruled every day life. This corresponding social structuration formed a society bifurcated between the Haitian oligarchy (the moneyed, city minorities) and the real sources of Haitian sovereignty (the black, poor agro-laborers), a bifurcation whose stress in flip constitutes the state of Haiti (388). In guiding us via the prolonged sociological politics in Haitian state-making, from its inner plantocratic schemas to its exterior American colonists, Casimir impresses on the reader the deep historical past of Haitian colonialism past imprecise gestures and one-dimensional vignettes of Saint-Dominque’s well-known racial hierarchies and system of enslavement.
It’s exactly these wealthy and nuanced portraits of imageries and contradictions that make the telling, or retelling, of Haiti’s historical past an act of decolonial histography. In the long run, Casimir’s level is straightforward as it’s constant: although the colonial cloth of thought laced each measure of the island, Haitian sovereignty unceasingly resisted in what the creator calls a wave of “counterthought, which in Haiti has by no means uninterested in expressing itself in its personal language” (99). This counterthought is certainly one of self-invention, worldmaking, and the battle for another social order via acts of decolonial praxis. Thus, the creolizing of Haiti didn’t finish in its linguistic namesake, Kreyòl, however sought to embody its folks in addition to its revolutionary means, the place the dialectical conflict of localized acts of resistance towards colonial captivity meant the expression of Haitian sovereignty, although restricted it might be. “For this very cause,” Casimir reminds us, “resistance was inseparable from compromise” (318).
As such, a dialectical stress emerges throughout the pressurized parameters of a captive, colonial milieu the place explosive but extended acts of freedom have been made intelligible and expressible. It’s inside this matrix of slavocratic motion and captive response “that the autogenesis of the Creole started” (293). Creolization defies the purities that inhere within the colonial complicated. It’s a second of, and motion in the direction of, charting new social geographies of belonging. That trajectory has not all the time been linear, as Haitian oligarchic pursuits stand in opposition to the core teleological crucial of Haitian in style sovereignty, what Casimir names “tout moun se moun—that’s, that we’re all equal earlier than the regulation. It [tout moun se moun] transformed itself right into a folks and expressed its will to dwell, in order that none of its kids would expertise the non-public dependency that typified trendy colonial relations” (389).
This decolonial will-to-live that overcame a colonial will-to-die turns into a refusal, a negation of the colonial dying venture. In so doing, Haitians reinvented the grammar of being, by excavating subaltern knowledges from under. “Haitians confronted a nineteenth-century Western world within the midst of increasing and consolidating its totalizing imaginative and prescient of the universe. In response, they constructed themselves” (347). In reconstructing Haitianness particularly and blackness extra broadly towards a colonial venture of existential erasure, Haitians created a brand new, various social order, one the place there’s a resuscitation of the situations of chance for black survival and flourishing.
And so, towards this backdrop, we return to the query with which we started: What does Casimir’s decolonial re-historicizing of Haiti presage for the way we grapple with the nation’s current situations? As I write, in gentle of my Caribbeanity, and just about my Jamaicanness, I learn the pages of my island’s premier newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, the place a headline reads: “Newest group of Haitians [refugees] being returned, lawyer warns Jamaica ‘breaking’ int’l regulation.” It appears to me Haiti could effectively need to anoint itself its personal nationwide and hemispheric savior because it as soon as did 219 years in the past. Jamaica and the opposite unbiased Caribbean states (together with, most notoriously, the Dominican Republic) haven’t but answered the decision of their sister nation.
However, the situations of chance for Haiti are, paradoxically, a denial of the situations of chance. It’s towards a colonial empire of destruction {that a} decolonial praxis of deconstruction, and later, reconstruction, is born. In a phrase, Haiti has been right here earlier than—on the edge of historic fault strains. At the moment, it defied the Euromodern creativeness of the 18th and 19th centuries; Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously argued that “[t]he Haitian Revolution thus entered historical past with the peculiar attribute of being unthinkable even because it occurred” (73). Within the 21st century, it might effectively have to take action once more.
Casimir’s The Haitians gives a decolonial justificatory treatise for exactly this remaking of latest histories, and with them, livable futures and an open class of the human being. It was Frantz Fanon who wrote, “allow us to reexamine the query of man” (237). Casimir’s opus plunges into that debate with a distinctly Haitian revolutionary inflection that makes for a really becoming recipient of Frantz Fanon Award. Within the remaining evaluation, The Haitians towers as a reconstructed roadmap for one more decolonial revolutionary occasion, past that of 1804.
Derefe Kimarley Chevannes
Derefe Kimarley Chevannes is an Assistant Professor within the Division of Political Science on the College of Memphis, who focuses on Africana Political Principle. Chevannes’ analysis pursuits heart on problems with black liberation and black radical thought within the trendy world. He writes on the intersection of Political Principle, Africana Research, Caribbean Research, and Incapacity Research.
