“Envision your cities shrouded in mourning… envision the care you took upon yourself, night and day, to revive your companions, envision your children, your soldiers, the peaceful inhabitants of the countryside crippled by the French,” wrote Louis- Felix Boisrond-Tonnerre, an early 19th-century Haitian thinker and former secretary to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, as he urged Haitians’ to remember their shared experience of the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution.
The gravity of the Haitian Revolution is incessantly muffled by constant news coverage spotlighting an impoverished Haiti while also criticizing its functionality as a free state. As a consequence, our shared memory of Haiti has forgotten the radical changes the Haitian Revolution and a sovereign Haiti brought to our modern world. Late 18th and early 19th-century Haitian thinkers, like Boisrond-Tonnerre, subjected to and shaped by the institution of enslavement, most certainly did not forget. Marlene L. Daut examines this collective remembrance in her book Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution. A book overflowing with the words of Haitian thinkers like Baron De Vastey, who knew not only the power of remembering their ancestral past but the significance of committing it to paper.
Today, as Haiti’s civil unrest dominates public media, it is hard to fathom that “Haiti” and “radical change” once existed in the same sentence. A Haiti free of disaster and political instability appears far from public imagination as conversations surrounding another military occupation emerge. For many years, the Western World has been fixated on how it can “fix” Haiti, ignoring its own responsibility for the country's problems. As a Haitian-American and scholar of Haitian history, I find myself presented with the question “What is wrong with Haiti?” in conversations regarding Haiti’s history or its present situation. These conversations usually end with me, a spirited junior scholar, sharing a bullet point list with extensive verbal footnotes, of all the reasons why this line of questioning is problematic. “Fixing” Haiti has led to U.S. military occupations, economic stagnation, extraction, a large Haitian departure from the island, and a dismissal of Haitians’ intellectual contributions to our current world. It was the work of pioneering Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir, followed by scholars including Brandon Byrd, Chelsea Steiber, and Mame-Fatou Niang, who engaged with his texts that taught me how global hegemonic structures oppressed Haitians and subverted Haiti’s sovereignty. Marlene Daut is one of these crucial scholars whose contagious passion for Haitian history fuels this groundbreaking account of Haitian intellectual history.
Read the rest here: https://nacla.org/awakening-ashes-haitian-revolution-review