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An Unthinkable History The Haitian Revolution as a Non-event 3 The young woman stood up in the middle of my lecture. Mr. Trouillot, you make us read all those white scholars. What can they know about slavery? Where were they when we were jumping off the boats? When we chose death over misery and killed our own children to spare them from a life of rape? I was scared and she was wrong. She was not reading white authors only and she never jumped from a slave ship. I was dumbfounded and she was angry; but how does one reason with anger? I was on my way to a Ph.D., and my teaching of this course was barely a stopover, a way of paying the dues of guilt in this lily-white institution. She had taken my class as a mental break on her way to med school, or Harvard law, or some lily-white corporation. I had entitled the course The Black Experience in the Americas. I should have known better: it attracted the few black students around plus a few courageous white and they were all expecting too much, much more than I could deliver. They wanted a life that no narrative could provide, even the best fiction. They wanted a life that only they could build right now, right here in the United States except that they did not know this: they were too close to the unfolding story. Yet already I could see in their eyes that part of my lesson registered. I wanted them to know that slavery did not happen only in Georgia and Mississippi. I wanted them to learn that the African connection was more complex and tortuous than they had ever imagined, that the U.S. monopoly on both blackness and racism was itself a racist plot. And she had broken the spell on her way to Harvard law. I was a novice and so was she, each of us struggling with the history we chose, each of us also fighting an imposed oblivion. Ten years later, I was visiting another institution with a less prestigious clientele and more modest dreams when another young black woman, the same age but much more timid, caught me again by surprise. I am tired, she said, to hear about this slavery stuff. Can we hear the story of the black millionaires? Had times changed so fast, or were their different takes on slavery reflections of class differences? I flashed back to the first woman clinging so tightly to that slave boat. I understood better why she wanted to jump, even once, on her way to Harvard law, med school, or wherever. Custodian of the future for an imprisoned race whose young males do not live long enough to have a past, she needed this narrative of resistance. Nietzsche was wrong: this was no extra baggage, but a necessity for the journey, and who was I to say that it was no better a past than a bunch of fake millionaires, or a medal of St. Henry and the crumbling walls of a decrepit palace? I wish I could shuffle the years and put both young women in the same room. We would have shared stories not yet in the archives. We would have read Ntozake Shange's tale of a colored girl dreaming of Toussaint Louverture and the revolution that the world forgot. Then we would have returned to the planters journals, to econometric history and its industry of statistics, and none of us would be afraid of the numbers. Hard facts are no more frightening than darkness. You can play with them if you are with friends. They are scary only if you read them alone. We all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are not in the classroom, not the history classrooms, anyway. They are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts. Otherwise, why would a black woman born and raised in the richest country of the late twentieth century be more afraid to talk about slavery than a white planter in colonial Saint-Domingue just days before rebellious slaves knocked on his door? This is a story for young black Americans who are still afraid of the dark. Although they are not alone, it may tell them why they feel they are. Unthinking a Chimera In 1790, just a few months before the beginning of the insurrection that shook Saint-Domingue and brought about the revolutionary birth of independent Haiti, French colonist La Barre reassured his metropolitan wife of the peaceful state of life in the tropics. He wrote: There is no movement among our Negroes. They don't even think of it. They are very tranquil and obedient. A revolt among them is impossible. And again: We have nothing to fear on the part of the Negroes; they are tranquil and obedient. And again: The Negroes are very obedient and always will be. We sleep with doors and windows wide open. Freedom for Negroes is a chimera.1 Historian Roger Dorsinville, who cites these words, notes that a few months later the most important slave insurrection in recorded history had reduced to insignificance such abstract arguments about Negro obedience. I am not so sure. When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse. La Barre's views were by no means unique. Witness this manager who constantly reassured his patrons in almost similar words: I live tranquilly in the midst of them without a single thought of their uprising unless that was fomented by the whites themselves.2 There were doubts at times. But the planters practical precautions aimed at stemming individual actions or, at worst, a sudden riot. No one in Saint- Domingue or elsewhere worked out a plan of response to a general insurrection. Indeed, the contention that enslaved Africans and their descendants could not envision freedomlet alone formulate strategies for gaining and securing such freedom was based not so much on empirical evidence as on an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants. Although by no means monolithic, this worldview was widely shared by whites in Europe and the Americas and by many non-white plantation owners as well. Although it left room for variations, none of these variations included the possibility of a revolutionary uprising in the slave plantations, let alone a successful one leading to the creation of an independent state. 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 on its own terms.3 They could read the news only with their ready-made categories, and these categories were incompatible with the idea of a slave revolution. The discursive context within which news from Saint-Domingue was discussed as it happened has important consequences for the historiography of Saint- Domingue/Haiti. If some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later? In other words, can historical narratives convey plots that are unthinkable in the world within which these narratives take place? How does one write a history of the impossible? The key issue is not ideological. Ideological treatments are now more current in Haiti itself (in the epic or bluntly political interpretations of the revolution favored by some Haitian writers) than in the more rigorous handling of the evidence by professionals in Europe or in North America. The international scholarship on the Haitian Revolution has been rather sound by modern standards of evidence since at least the 1940s. The inference, methodological in the broadest sense. Standards of evidence notwithstanding, to what extent has modern historiography of the Haitian Revolution as part of a continuous Western discourse on slavery, race, and colonization broken the iron bonds of the philosophical milieu in which it was born? is rather epistemological and, by issue