Welcome to the Foire d'Opinions Haitiennes forums.
You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community you will have access to post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), respond to polls, upload content and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community today!
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact us.
Toussaint Louverture: "The Black Napoleon" or "Black Spartacus" or "Moses of Haiti"
"The Black Napoleon" : TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
February 25, 2007
A Biography. By Madison Smartt Bell.
Illustrated. 333 pp. Pantheon Books. $27.
Quick, what was the second country in the New World to win full independence from its colonial masters in the Old? Mexico? Brazil? Some place liberated by Bolívar?
The answer, Madison Smartt Bell reminds us, is Haiti ? which actually gave Bolívar some help.
The years of horrendous warfare that culminated in Haiti?s birth in 1804 is one of the most inspiring and tragic chapters in the story of the Americas. For one thing, it was history?s only successful large-scale slave revolt. The roughly half a million slaves who labored on the plantations of what was then the French territory of St. Domingue had made it the most lucrative colony anywhere in the world. Its rich, well irrigated soil, not yet overworked and eroded, produced more than 30 percent of the world?s sugar, more than half its coffee and a cornucopia of other crops.
When the slaves there rose up in 1791, they sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic world. But the rebels did more than win. In five years of fighting, they also inflicted a humiliating defeat on a large invasion force from Britain, which, at war with France, wanted to seize this profitable territory for itself. And later they did the same to a vast military expedition sent by Napoleon, who vainly tried to recapture the colony and restore slavery. The long years of race-based mass murder (which included a civil war between blacks and gens de couleur, as those of mixed race were known) left more than half the population dead or exiled, and Haiti lives with that legacy of violence still. Seldom have people anywhere fought so hard for their freedom.
Seldom, too, have they so much owed success to one extraordinary man. Toussaint Louverture, a short, wiry coachman skilled in veterinary medicine, had been freed some years before the upheaval. About 50 when the revolt began, he was one of those rare figures ? Trotsky is the only other who comes to mind ? who in midlife suddenly became a self-taught military genius. He welded the rebel slaves into disciplined units, got French deserters to train them, incorporated revolution-minded whites and gens de couleur into his army and used his legendary horsemanship to rush from one corner of the colony to another, cajoling, threatening, making and breaking alliances with a bewildering array of factions and warlords, and commanding his troops in one brilliant assault, feint or ambush after another. Finally lured into negotiations with one of Napoleon?s generals in 1802, he was captured and swiftly whisked off to France. Deliberately kept alone, cold and underfed deep inside a fortress in the Jura mountains, he died in April 1803.
Toussaint?s is an epic story, and it lies at the heart of a much praised trilogy by Bell, the prolific American novelist. Bell?s new biography, ?Toussaint Louverture,? is resolutely nonfiction, however. And welcome it is, for the existing biographies, from Ralph Korngold?s 1944 effort (dated, uncritical and unsourced) to Pierre Pluchon?s 1989 book (quirky, negative and only in French) are mostly unsatisfactory. Bell knows the primary and scholarly literature well, carefully sifts fact from myth and generally maintains a sober and responsible understated tone.
Maybe a little too sober and understated. I can?t help wondering whether Bell, so well known for his novels of Haiti, is bending over backward to show that as a biographer he is not making anything up. I wish he had given more rein to his novelist?s skills ? not by inventing things, but by making more narrative use of the wealth of detail there is about this time and place. Part of the problem is that almost none of that detail has to do with the life of Toussaint himself, about whose first 50 years we know next to nothing. Bell points this out, and so the sources he quotes are almost entirely from after Toussaint?s sudden emergence as a leader: his letters and proclamations, and the relatively few eyewitness accounts of him.
But this largely leaves out the rich array of documentary testimony we have about life in brutal, high-living colonial St. Domingue, about people ranging from the planter Jean-Baptiste de Caradeux, who entertained his guests by seeing who could knock an orange off a slave?s head with a pistol shot at 30 paces, to the French prostitute who came to the colony looking for wealthy white clients and then complained to a newspaper that she found too much competition. And both British and French officers left diaries and memoirs about fighting the unexpectedly skilled rebel slaves ? accounts as searing and vivid in their frustration as those by American soldiers blogging from Iraq.
Such things are not precisely about Toussaint, but they flesh out the world in which he lived and fought, and American readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of Haitian history need all the help they can get.
Still, this is the best biography of Toussaint yet, in large part because Bell does not shy away from the man?s contradictions. Although a former slave, he had owned slaves himself. Although he led a great slave revolt, he was desperate to trade export crops for defense supplies and so imposed a militarized forced labor system that was slavery in all but name. He was simultaneously a devout Catholic, a Freemason and a secret practitioner of voodoo. And although the monarchs of Europe regarded him with unalloyed horror, he in effect turned himself into one of them by fashioning a constitution making himself his country?s dictator for life, with the right to name his successor.
?Within Haitian culture,? Bell writes, ?there are no such contradictions, but simply the actions of different spirits which may possess one?s being under different circumstances and in response to vastly different needs. There is no doubt that from time to time Toussaint Louverture made room in himself for angry, vengeful spirits, as well as the more beneficent? ones. Of such contradictions are great figures made; just think of our own Thomas Jefferson ? who, incidentally, ordered money and muskets sent to his fellow slave owners to suppress Toussaint?s drive for freedom, saying of it, ?Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man.?
Adam Hochschild?s most recent book is ?Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire?s Slaves.?
Black Spartacus: Triumph and Death of Haiti?s Hero: book review
Black Spartacus: Triumph and Death of Haiti?s Hero: book review
Saturday, February 24, 2007
New York, USA (Bloomberg): ?The leader of the only successful slave revolution in recorded history? ended his days, according to Madison Smartt Bell, imprisoned ?behind five heavy double doors? in the innermost cell of a fortress ?ringed by five concentric walls and three moats.? In the late 18th century, Toussaint Louverture liberated half a million slaves on the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue, laying the foundation for modern Haiti. Bell has created two portraits of this black Spartacus.
His new ?Toussaint Louverture? is a straightforward biography of 333 pages that focuses on the public figure of the years 1791-1802. His trilogy of historical novels (published 1995-2004) covers the same period in just over 2,000 pages.
Both works retrace the little that is known about Toussaint up to his late 40s (his given birth year ranges from 1739 to 1746; he died in 1803), when he became a focal point of rebellion, war and politics with international repercussions. It was a remarkable life in an extraordinary time.
Born into slavery, Toussaint became a plantation overseer, acquired freedom and literacy, and owned at least one plantation with slaves himself. As a rebel leader, he groomed an army, dealt with blandishments and threats from Spain, Britain, the US and France, abolished slavery, wrote a constitution and declared himself governor for life.
Paris couldn?t accept emancipation. The islands labor-intensive sugar plantations brought wealth to a nation financially drained by war. Napoleon sent an invasion force; more than 50,000 of its soldiers died in battle or from disease.
Toussaint proved to be a wily general and a master of the island?s mountainous terrain, over which he raced tirelessly on his white horse. In the end he negotiated a truce and retired with honor ? but he was duped and deported to France, where he died in prison.
Bell?s biography has a scholarly dryness that reflects the considerable research he put into the novels and perhaps an earnest caution after all the liberties taken in the fiction.
The fiction fills gaps in the life and enlivens known facts with imagined events, of course, but it does much more: It gives human faces to the complex racial distinctions at the heart of the bloody conflict. (In an appendix, Bell cites more than 100 racial classifications.) It frees the narrative from the constraints of chronicle, moving constantly around the island and bringing sex, manners and mores onto the page in ways history rarely can.
The biography?s writing is generally crisp; it sketches the turmoil in and among the Western powers, placing Toussaint amid the era?s two epochal revolutions. The trilogy is lush with detail but also digressive, revoltingly violent (especially in the first volume), prone to melodrama and dependent on an implausibly high survival rate (given the wholesale slaughter of those years) for its principal players.
Which to read? There?s a case for doing both, in tandem, maybe after a speed-reading course. The novels are allusive about many of the historical events the biography presents clearly.
Sometimes, though, facts fall short. The biography gives you the size of Toussaint?s cell in the Jura Mountains of France, the prisoner?s meager supply of food and fuel.
The novels add the dankness, the dying embers, the chill of the stone underfoot and the general?s piercing memory of himself on horseback racing along mountain paths in sunshine and in moonlight, as powerful and as free as any man alive.
?Toussaint Louverture: A Biography? is published by Pantheon (333 pages, $27). The trilogy ? ?All Souls? Rising,? ?Master of the Crossroads? and ?The Stone That the Builder Refused? ? is available in paperback from Vintage.
(Jeffrey Burke is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
A novelist explains a hero who led a revolt against French slavery in 1791.
Sunday, February 25, 2007; BW04
TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
A Biography
By Madison Smartt Bell
Pantheon. 333 pp. $27
The framed sketch of Fran?ois Dominique Toussaint Louverture that hangs in my Haitian father's study shows the 18th-century general stiff-backed and in uniform, with large eyes and his hair combed back. I've seen the portrait more times than I can count but have little more than a superficial sense of the man who has merited a place in the heart, and on the wall, of my naturalized Haitian-American parents.
Madison Smartt Bell seems to believe that most readers will bring a similarly blank slate to his latest work, a biography of the Haitian leader who led "the only successful slave revolution in recorded history." Louverture is "the highest-achieving African American hero of all time," Bell writes. "And yet, two hundred years after his death in prison and the declaration of independence of Haiti, the nation whose birth he made possible, he remains one of the least known and most poorly understood among those heroes."
Bell, a prolific novelist, has become so consumed with the history of Haiti that he brushed up on his French, learned to speak Creole and wrote a fictional trilogy about the Haitian revolution. But even if you missed All Souls' Rising (1995), a finalist for the National Book Award, or Master of the Crossroads (2000) and The Stone That the Builder Refused (2004), you'll know from Bell's confident new venture into biography that he has spent a great deal of his career immersed in Haiti -- not only in giving Louverture and the Haitian people their due but in praising their achievements and exploring their cultural intricacies.
A country now mired in poverty and instability had its beginnings in the late 17th century as a French slave colony called Saint Domingue. Louverture himself was born Toussaint Br?da, named for the Br?da plantation. The country's mix of classes and races -- the inevitable result of years of slaves intermingling with their white French owners -- and the resentment among groups that included gens de couleur (mulattoes) and black slaves made the sugar and coffee plantation colony a powder keg. But it took Louverture's sheer determination to unite the fractured country and lead it to the brink of freedom from its white overseers -- a task that, upon Louverture's death in 1803 at the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte's forces, was carried out by Gen. Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
This biography largely achieves Bell's aim of shedding light on the personality of Louverture. Haiti's liberator comes across here as a skilled orator, a gifted writer and a leader who exuded the utmost confidence -- whether when writing to the French civil commissioner, L?ger F?licit? Sonthonax, to argue for freedom or when speaking to field hands on a plantation. The impending slave revolt, which began in 1791 and culminated in 1803, serves as a driving narrative force that propels the book, as it did Louverture's real life. But the overall arc of that life often gets lost behind a myriad of details, giving the book a slightly academic feel that may limit its audience to college students and the most ardent devotees of Haitian culture and history. Those who do read Toussaint Louverture, however, will find an important recounting of a little-known piece of history. ?
Black history gets a new look and new breadth and depth in publications that address everything from the leader of the Haitian rebellion to the search for Oprah's family roots.
Black history, once shamefully neglected, is a constantly unfolding source of study, as scholars probe and revisit events and people whose impact and names have long been known but perhaps not fully or correctly understood. Familiar stories are given new breadth and depth in books released this year on a range of subjects, from Toussaint Louverture, who led the Haitian Revolution of 1791, to Jesse Owens, whose athletic prowess refuted Nazi theories of Aryan supremacy, the deadly hysteria over a false "Negro plot" against whites in 18th-century New York and the Underground Railroad that funneled slaves to freedom. Here is a look at some of the most interesting titles:
"Toussaint Louverture" (Pantheon, $27): Acclaimed novelist Madison Smartt Bell has long been fascinated with the history of Haiti, and his biography reads like an engrossing historical novel. Louverture is a complex subject: He was born a slave and later in life was a slave-owner. He was an advocate for freedom who nevertheless took Louis XVI's side during the French Revolution. And he betrayed a planned slave revolt in Jamaica while working for the liberation of black people in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Louverture has been praised or condemned in other books. Bell (who also has written a three-part trilogy on the rebellion) seeks to provide a balanced look at this complicated historical figure.
"The Great Negro Plot" (Bloomsbury, $19.95): The Salem witch trials were not the only occasion in U.S. history of hysteria leading to unwarranted killings. A less well-known example, fueled by race rather than religion, is related by Mat Johnson. Subtitled "A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York," it describes how fears of a conspiracy by angry blacks to burn New York were stoked by the dubious testimony in 1741 of a 16-year-old white indentured servant. As the hysteria grew, about 150 black people were jailed, 18 hanged, 13 burned at the stake and more than 100 "disappeared." Why did this happen? "People believed that the Great Negro Plot, regardless of the evidence, was a real threat, and this in itself brought real consequences," Johnson writes. "White people believed it. Black people believed it."
"From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad" (Doubleday, $24.95): Many Americans know that the Underground Railroad was a coalition of opponents of slavery who provided refuge and help for black slaves seeking freedom. In this book, Jacqueline L. Tobin and Hettie Jones explain what happened when they reached havens in Canada. "Midnight" was a code name for Detroit, the last stop on the U.S. side. The book tells about those who created the railroad and the thousands who took it to new and satisfying lives in Canada, where they were protected by British law, in settlements with names such as Dawn.
"Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics" (Houghton Mifflin, $24): Americans also know about Jesse Owens, the phenomenal track star who refuted Nazi claims of Aryan racial superiority by winning four medals in the 1936 Olympics in Germany. But some details of his near-legendary story have not been accurately told, says author Jeremy Schaap, an ESPN anchor and national correspondent. Schaap draws a full portrait of Owens as a superstar athlete but a second-class citizen in the 1930s, when racial prejudice and Jim Crow laws held sway. (His wife and parents, for instance, were turned away from some New York hotels when they went to meet Owens on his return to the United States from Germany.) Schaap says that contrary to legend, Owens never was snubbed by the Nazis, as he had claimed, nor did he offer his place on the U.S. Olympic team to a Jewish athlete. A behind-the-scenes look at a complex, gifted man.
"Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, The Crisis That Shook the Nation" (Free Press, $30): Historian Elizabeth Jacoway recalls the turmoil in Arkansas in 1957 when a Little Rock high school attempted integration following the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. Gov. Orval Faubus defied the city's plan, President Eisenhower sent in troops, black students were cruelly harassed and schools were closed for a year before integration began to be accepted. Jacoway, slightly younger than the Little Rock Nine and related to the school superintendent, writes that she did not fully understand the crisis, or the deep fears of miscegenation she believes underpinned white resistance, until she entered college. Her book is a personal look, with many interviews, at a seminal point in U.S. history.
"Finding Oprah's Roots: Finding Your Own" (Crown, $19.95): Distinguished Harvard history Prof. and author Henry Louis Gates Jr. takes on the complex subject of black ancestry. A companion book to the PBS show "Oprah's Roots," the book recaps the research Gates and Winfrey did for the 2006 PBS series "African American Lives" and adds information for readers who want to trace their own family histories. Also included are interviews with members of Winfrey's family and information from geneticists and historians about genealogical research. "If we want to go forward, we need to be able to look back and know where we came from," Gates writes.
"Untold Glory: African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity and Achievement" (Harlem Moon/Broadway, $15.95): Author and historian Alan Govenar tells 27 stories of achievers who excelled, despite discrimination, in business, art, politics, sports, entertainment and religion. Some are famous, such as former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder and painter Jacob Lawrence; others are not so well-known. But each interview tells an inspiring success story and, says Publisher's Weekly, "By the end, Govenar's voices offer an eye-opening corrective for familiar stereotypes of African Americans."
"For the Confederate Dead" (Knopf, $24.95): It might be hard to find the news in poems, but the same can't be said of history, as Kevin Young demonstrates in his new collection. The title signifies Robert Lowell's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, "For the Union Dead," but Young owes a greater debt to the late Gwendolyn Brooks. "We wade in your wake," he writes in an opening elegy, then proceeds to show how many tricks and moves she taught him. Here are poems about African-American experience, from ballads of slavery to a fictional travelogue of Booker T. Washington traveling abroad. Young tries on several forms, but as always, he's most comfortable singing the blues. "His favorite/sport was thirst,/which only made things worse."
John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, contributed to this compilation; Carole Goldberg is books editor of the Hartford Courant.
For sometimes scant evidence, Bell pieces together his path from slave to father of modern Haiti
February 25, 2007
Toussaint Louverture: A Biography
By Madison Smartt Bell
Pantheon, 333 pp., $27
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a trio of interconnected revolutions rocked the Atlantic world. The first was the American, and the second the French. The third, the Haitian Revolution, established the second independent postcolonial nation in the Western Hemisphere in 1804 -- and the first in the Americas to be governed by people of African descent. As Madison Smartt Bell notes in his new biography of revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, the emergence of an independent Haiti constituted the most successful slave revolt in history, sending shock waves through the slaveholding societies of the Americas, including the United States.
The French colony of Saint Domingue occupied the western third of the island of Hispaniola. Its sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations produced fantastic wealth, making it the most lucrative European colony in the Americas. The motor for this wealth was the labor of a half-million black slaves, more than half of whom had been born in Africa.
As Bell, the author of a trilogy of novels about the Haitian Revolution, ably demonstrates, the society of Saint Domingue in the late 18th century was extraordinarily complex, ethnically, socially, and politically. Most of the colony's wealth was concentrated in the hands of the large plantation owners, the so-called grands blancs, who were generally royalist in their politics. A class of striving white merchants and artisans known as the petits blancs tended to support the emerging French Revolution while remaining invested in the slave system. There also existed a significant group of mixed European and African ancestry, the gens du couleur, for the most part the descendants of grand blanc slave masters and slave women.
The gens du couleur, too, were often planters and slave owners with significant, if ambiguous, ties to their grand blanc relatives. While they fought for their own equality, the gens du couleur were often ambivalent at best about the rights of the black majority that formed more than 85 percent of the population. Even this black majority was divided between a small group of those who either had been born free or had gained their freedom and the vastly greater number who labored in slavery. The former group, which included Toussaint (who learned to read and write at an early age), often rivaled the gens du couleur economically while retaining an inferior social status. The black majority was also divided between the somewhat larger portion that had been born in Africa and the creoles born on the island.
Rising from a slave to a prosperous landowner, Toussaint threw in his lot with the black masses in their revolt against the abuses of the slave system on the Northern Plain of Saint Domingue, developing into an astute and sometimes ruthless and self-interested military and political leader. He needed these qualities to negotiate the treacherous path between the colonial powers of France, Great Britain, and Spain, and the new nation of the United States, between grands blancs, petits blancs, mixed-race gens du couleur, and black slaves and free men and women, between royalists, republicans, and Bonapartists.
One of the great strengths of Bell's book is the way it succinctly delineates and animates the swiftly changing alliances and conflicts inside and outside the island as Toussaint and his forces successfully battle French, Spanish, British, planter, and gens du couleur armies. Though Toussaint died a captive of Napoleon in 1803 after, perhaps intentionally, walking into a French trap, the forces he did much to set in motion ultimately triumphed over Bonaparte's armies that same year in what might be the greatest defeat of European colonialism in the 19th century. The Republic of Haiti (from the old Taino name for Hispaniola) declared its independence on Jan. 1, 1804 .
One of the great challenges that Bell faced in writing the biography is that Toussaint was a notoriously guarded man who seldom revealed his deeper emotions and motivations. In addition, many of the contemporary accounts of him were written by detractors. As a result Bell is often forced to speculate about Toussaint's inner life (his religious beliefs in a culture in which Catholicism and the syncretic African-American vodou were widely and often simultaneously practiced, for example) in ways that are not as satisfying as his narration and explication of complex historical events -- though to his credit, Bell's speculations are generally clearly labeled as such. At times, too, when Bell moves away from Haiti to a larger frame, his touch is not as sure. For example, Négritude was not, as he describes, a " pan-Caribbean" movement, but a Francophone pan-African movement that included artists, activists, and intellectuals from Africa and the Americas. Also, his tendency to describe various African peoples from a range of economies, polities, and social structures as "tribes" seems anachronistic.
Still, as the first English-language biography of Toussaint in decades, "Toussaint Louverture" is an excellent introduction to one of the great, if elusive, personalities of history, one who was central to the epoch-making events of the Haitian Revolution. While the significance of Toussaint and the revolution remains obscure to many white Americans, as Bell points out in his afterword, it remains very much in the minds of artists and intellectuals of African descent in this hemisphere even now.
James Smethurst teaches in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Black Spartacus: Triumph and Death of Haiti?s Hero: book review 
Linear Mode
Similar Threads 
