[News] Wanda Sabir: Haiti according to Hochschild

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Haiti according to Hochschild

by Wanda Sabir
a3c4dd.jpg

Gen. Jean Jacques Dessalines

In the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine this past Sunday, an article 
appeared by Adam Hochschild on Haiti. An excerpt from his book, "Bury the 
Chains," which will be published by Houghton Mifflin in January 2005, 
starts out promising, yet quickly - within sentences, shifts into a deluge 
of propaganda which paints the Haitian revolution as one led by 
bloodthirsty savages, who brutally conquer their enslavers then continue 
the legacy of bloodletting for two centuries forward in a series of coups 
and self-destructive violence to self and the land.

By the time the readers get to the last paragraphs where Haiti's first 
democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is mentioned, 
along with America's destabilization efforts and the important example 
Haiti sets for the region, one's sentiments have been strongly steered 
toward the white imperialists who, according to Hochschild, suffered 
horribly at the hands of African brutes.

Hochschild uses slave owners' accounts of the events of 1791, that meeting 
on the mountain with Boukman and Fatiman and 200 representatives from 
surrounding plantations and elsewhere in the narrative. What's implied is 
that the African faith is "uncivilized," a perception that is reinforced to 
this day in most depictions of Vodun in Haiti and abroad.

In subsequent passages, the image of debauchery and decadent values 
practiced by the Europeans lead one to assume that the battle for African 
freedom is inevitable, even though Hochschild attributes much of the 
eventual success of Africans soldiers over the French and British to 
illness and poor strategy, not to the superior military prowess of generals 
like Jean Jacques Dessalines and the bravery of the Haitian people. 
Toussaint L'Ouverture is the convenient focus of the treatise, as he is the 
only general who had anything to do with the Europeans, thus more 
Eurocentric documentation.

Toussaint actually bargained with the revolutionaries not to harm the white 
family who had freed him and for whom he worked, according to Hochschild, 
and out of respect they humored him. However, none of this regard was shown 
to the general when after negotiating with French, he ended up in a cold, 
damp prison, where he died in April 7, 1803. How's that for loving thy enemy?

Dessalines, on the other hand, had nothing to do with the French, whom he 
didn't trust. What's wrong with loving Black people, which is the symbol of 
the Haitian flag, the blue and red of the French flag minus its menacing 
whiteness? Hochschild writes briefly of the differences between the poor 
Kreyol speaking Africans and the French speaking majority middle-class, 
non-slave mulattos, then tries unsuccessfully in one sentence to draw a 
parallel between the events of 2004 and those of the insurgency movement on 
the ground in Haiti 200 years earlier, which, according to his references, 
was a multinational one including "control of rival warlords and their 
heavily armed followers."

For me, the true hero of the Haitian revolution was Dessalines, who knew 
the white man's whip and believed in the sovereignty of his nation and that 
of all African people throughout the Diaspora.

I don't even get a sense of the inhumanity of slavery in Hochschild's 
article. Yes, the data is there; however, the tone doesn't reflect its 
horror. One doesn't see people; it's as if the evidence were stripped away. 
Granted, a few African generals are mentioned by name, but the majority - 
men, women and children - remain anonymous, therefore easier to dismiss no 
matter how tragic their demise.

Firsthand accounts surround the conqueror's removal. Hochschild paints a 
very brutal war and an even more brutal enslavement. He writes, "West 
Indian slavery was, by every measure, far more deadly than slavery in the 
American South. Cultivating sugar cane by hand was - and still is - one of 
the hardest ways of life on earth." If this is so, then the rebellion was 
inevitable.

Never does Hochschild admit that the Europeans got what was coming to them, 
that they deserved everything the Africans threw at them. Instead, he 
spends lots of time analyzing the conquering general Toussaint.

Is the implication that African people cannot rule themselves? President 
Aristide seemed to be doing just that before the coup in February, backed 
by the United States and other Western nations, removed him from power. And 
though Hochschild does mention the payment of money by the Haitian 
government at cannon point to former plantation owners, he does not state 
the destabilizing effect the demand for 90 million gold francs - $21.8 
billion today - had on the country, money President Aristide has asked 
returned, with interest.

The account is clearly anti-African; one could even find herself feeling 
sorry for the Europeans who clearly are the victims in this version of the 
story. Considering Hochschild's book, "King Leopold's Ghost," and how 
well-documented and presented that tale was - my alliance never shifted 
from oppressed to oppressor as I read it - I was disorientated by the 
obvious political angle in this latest work.

What happened to objectivity? Hochschild's slanted account gives credence 
to the media frenzy that justifies Aristide's "coup-nap" and Haiti's failed 
democracy. Is his soon to be released work, "Bury the Chains," what Noam 
Chomsky discusses in "Media Control," "the manufacture of consent in 
spectator not participatory democracies"? We'll have to read it and see for 
ourselves.

Post-9/11 America is a place where certain elite or intellectual classes 
support state sponsored campaigns of misinformation, much of it fabricated, 
so that power and control stays in the hands of the few.

Wanda Sabir, M.A., the Bay View's long time arts editor, also writes for 
the Oakland Tribune and teaches college-level English composition and 
literature. Email her at wsab1 at aol.com. Haitian attorney Marguerite Laurent 
has also commented on Hochschild's story. Read her critique at 
www.sfbayview.com.


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