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<font size=3>Haiti according to Hochschild<br><br>
<b><i>by Wanda Sabir <br>
</i></b><img src="cid:6.1.0.6.2.20040603082453.0269c5b0@66.103.156.66.0" width=100 height=139 alt="a3c4dd.jpg"></i></b><br>
Gen. Jean Jacques Dessalines<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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? <br><br>
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."
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.
<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<i>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@aol.com. Haitian attorney Marguerite
Laurent has also commented on Hochschild’s story. Read her critique at
<a href="http://www.sfbayview.com/" eudora="autourl">www.sfbayview.com</a>.<br><br>
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