Haiti’s founding revolution, which first overthrew slavery and then gained independence from France in 1804, was a resonant act of political imagination. But as Johnny Celestin, Lillian Guerra, and Nedgine Paul Deroly all explore in the essays that follow, the aspirations and possibilities opened up by that struggle and the many that have followed since in Haiti have always confronted forces that have sought to contain, silence, and suppress them. As the Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot famously argued in his book Silencing the Past, many outsiders considered the revolution itself “unthinkable” because it was a profound challenge to the very categories and forms of thinking that reigned at the time. Today, as Paul Deroly notes, we remain in a “vicious cycle” where models imposed on Haiti have failed again and again, yet “continue to be promoted.” As both she and Celestin argue, there is a profound need for new forms of political imagination—and action—in Haiti and its diaspora in order to confront the deep, interlocking crises of the present. These include many longstanding economic, environmental, and political challenges that have been made more acute by a period of violence that has devastated Port-au-Prince and made life difficult in many other parts of the country as well.
Collectively, the authors put forth an analysis of the forces at work shaping the current context and insist on the need for new approaches, crystallized in Paul Deroly’s call for a “re-Haitianization” of the processes that will shape the future of the country. In the process, they show that we need to ground our analysis of the present in a clear understanding of the historical forces at work, as Guerra does in tracing the ongoing legacies of Duvalierism, a topic also explored by Trouillot in his classic book State Against Nation. And we also need to acknowledge, as Paul Deroly insists, that “Haitian culture, history, language and identity itself carry assets that we need to be free.” Celestin reminds us that it was solidarity among people “who recognized that the struggle was larger than their personal conflicts” that made the Haitian Revolution a success, and that that model of “organized, persistent, and collective effort” can be an inspiration for the present. He and Paul Deroly both center the practice of Konbit as a necessary pillar for work that can unite Haitians in the country and across the diaspora around projects that refuse damaging and false representations and resist division in pursuit of strategic and collective action. Together, these articles offer new ways of thinking about Haiti and a powerful vision and approach rooted in the country’s culture and history that can build a different future.
Laurent Dubois is the author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.
Haiti’s Path to Liberation
Parables of Empire & Unfreedom in Haiti Today
Re-Haitianizing Haitian Freedom: What Will It Take?
