Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

Dessalines, a former slave and Haiti’s new leader, replaced the French colonial “Saint-

Domingue” with “Ayti” after the aboriginal Taino Indian word for “highlands.”^4 Although

revisiting this moment affords unprecedented opportunity for new political, historical, and

literary reflections, these events were silenced, obscured or maligned in most American and

European historical accounts for nearly two hundred years.

Haitian-born Michel-Rolph Trouillot was at the forefront of turning this tide, signaling

the one-sidedness of Western historicity that would be evident when it came to accounting for

events like slave revolts and Haitian independence. His 1995 work Silencing the Past: Power

and the Production of History is now cited, studied, or incorporated by numerous critics writing

about the Haitian Revolution. Trouillot argues that silences are inherent in constructing

histories, as something is always left out as other facts are being recorded. The Haitian

Revolution, however, bore the extra burden of being “unthinkable” and thereby silenced in

dominant Western accounts of the day:

The Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of

being unthinkable even as it happened. Official debates and publications of the

times, including the long list of pamphlets on Saint-Domingue published in

France from 1790 to 1804, reveal the incapacity of most contemporaries to

understand the ongoing revolution in its own terms. They could read the news

only with the ready-made categories, and these categories were incompatible with

the idea of a slave revolution.^5

As Trouillot also explains, this “unthinkability” rested with the assumption that enslaved

Africans could never envision freedom for themselves in a way that meant translating those

desires into a military victory against the best armies of the day. This contention, Trouillot

states, was based less on empirical evidence than on “ontology, an implicit organization of the

(^4) Jensen 3.
(^5) Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)
73.