ABSTRACT 
 
 
 
 
Title of Thesis: THE DRAMA OF HISTORY: 
REPRESENTATION AND 
REVOLUTIONARIES IN HAITIAN 
THEATER, 1818-1907  
  
 Nathan Hobson Dize, Master of Arts, 2016 
  
Thesis Directed By: Professor Valérie K. Orlando, Department of 
French and Italian 
 
Since the beginning of the Haitian theatrical tradition there has been an ineluctable 
dedication to the representation of Haitian history on stage. Given the rich theatrical 
archive about Haiti throughout the world, this study considers operas and plays written 
solely by Haitian playwrights. By delving into the works of Juste Chanlatte, Massillon 
Coicou, and Vendenesse Ducasse this study proposes a re-reading of Haitian theater that 
considers the stage as an innovative site for contesting negative and clichéd 
representations of the Haitian Revolution and its revolutionary leadership. A genre long 
mired in accusations of mimicking European literary forms, this study proposes a 
reevaluation of Haitian theater and its literary origins.  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE DRAMA OF HISTORY: REPRESENTATION AND REVOLUTIONARIES IN 
HAITIAN THEATER, 1818-1907 
 
 
by 
 
 
 
Nathan Hobson Dize 
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the 
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of  
Masters of Arts 
2016 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 
Professor Valérie K. Orlando, Chair 
Associate Professor Caroline Eades  
Associate Professor David Sartorius  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
© Copyright by 
Nathan Hobson Dize 
2016 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ii 
Acknowledgements 
Even though I was always surrounded by them, I did not grow up a lover of 
books. It was not until I was in my first semester of college, struggling to adjust to life 
away from home, did I find myself lost in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Camus’ 
various Algerian countrysides, or Baldwin’s New York. Reading became my refuge, my 
escape, and the way that I would relate to the world around me. While it is reading that 
has undoubtedly led me to complete this study, I would be remiss if I did not take the 
time to acknowledge those who have always been a profound source of encouragement, 
support, friendship, and love. Because even though this is a study of fictional works, none 
of the works I study would have existed without those elements either. 
 First, to Merle Collins, who gave me the space to grow in the numerous courses I 
took with her as an undergraduate English major interested in the Caribbean. I am 
grateful for her warmth and caring support, she always made me feel at home in her 
classes and during our many encounters in office hours. I used to say to friends that I 
majored in Merle Collins, which was not far from the truth. It must have been strange to 
sit in her seat and hear a student say that he thought he wanted to do a PhD in literature, 
but did not know why. With Professor Collins’s encouragement, I would not have 
struggled to learn French. For that, I am eternally thankful.  
 To my professors and TAs in the University of Maryland Department of French 
and Italian, thank you for providing me with a home ever since I first stepped into a 
classroom in 2010. I want to thank CJ Gomolka, Valerie Orlando, and Sarah Benharrech 
for their support in some of my roughest linguistic and personal times. Whether I shared 
the details with you, or not, you have always helped me refocus my energy into the 
iii 
French language. Un grand merci is due to Caroline Eades because without her I would 
have never been able to enter the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon as an English 
lecturer. During those ten months spent in Lyon I lived in French for the first time, met 
some of the most incredible people, and my French language abilities blossomed because 
of it. To my former instructors in the French department who then became my colleagues, 
Erica Cefalo in particular, thank you for welcoming me to your ranks and for your 
friendship. Lastly, for my colleagues still at the University of Maryland, thank you for 
your motivation, care, and support. 
 Apart from the Department of English and French and Italian, I spent many 
formative years in the Latin American Studies program at the University of Maryland. I 
had the honor of taking courses with Ivette Rodriguez-Santana, David Sartorius, and 
Daryle Williams. They challenged me to use my close reading skills in order to think like 
a historian, they exposed me to difficult texts, and provided me with the space to explore 
my interests. Thanks to Ivette for the numerous hours we spent in her office talking about 
life, studies, and everything in between. Thank you for prophesying that one day I would 
speak English, French, Kreyòl, and Spanish, I’m almost there. Thanks to David for his 
unwavering support and feedback, I have never been so challenged intellectually than in 
your company. And to Daryle, thanks for being a wonderful friend, and for the hour-long 
bike rides, especially those that do not end in fender-benders. 
 I cannot forget the impact that my professional community has had on my 
scholarship and my life. Mèsi anpil to my friends in Haitian studies how have been there 
since I first presented on Haiti in 2014. A special thanks goes to Marlene Daut, Julia 
Gaffield, Paul Miller, Mariana Past, Gina Athena Ulysse, John Walsh for your 
iv 
unwavering support, graceful answers to silly questions, and for including an MA student 
in your projects and thinking. You have changed the way I look at the world and 
academia. 
 Day in and day out, I am thankful for my friends in and outside of school, you 
motivate me and keep me pushin’. First, to my friends from Baltimore, Adam Stokes, 
James Tagliaferro, and Zachary Wiener, you have always been there when I needed you. 
Thank you for twelve years of friendship. As we have grown up, moved away from home 
and back, our friendship has never wavered, and I know that it never will. To my friends 
in the university world and abroad, I want to thank Kelsey Corlett-Rivera for her mutual 
appreciation of sarcasm, Gary Lardaux for his ability to talk with nearly anyone 
regardless of the language, Magali Chatelain for her unbelieveable kindness, Florent 
Gonsalès for his untiring ear, Adrian May for his wisdom, Annie Rehill for her 
unwavering pragmatism, Cae Joseph-Messena for our conversations argotiques about 
Haiti and life. A special thanks to Chris Lewis and Abby Broughton, you two keep me 
grounded, laughing, and always encourage me to go for the terrible dad-joke as a source 
of happiness. Thank you. 
I must recognize my wonderful family for their care and support. I have left them 
for months and years at a time, exploring subjects from esoteric to strange, in the pursuit 
of my dreams. Although I think it is hard to understand, nobody understands better than 
my family. To my mother and father, Mawzy and Paw, thank you for raising me to be a 
child who unabashedly expresses his feelings; you did a wonderful job. To Helen 
Atkinson, thank you for challenging me every day to be my best self. To my brothers 
Crannie, Marty, Sammy, Mischa, Paulie, and not so little Mateo, thank you for the hard 
v 
knocks and the good times, I love you all. To Erin Cunningham and Heather Dize, I’m 
glad you’re in my life and a part of my family, you always bring me a smile. To my little 
heart-breaking nephews, Llama and Bean, stay cute, and Uncle Nathan will be home 
soon. I need to take the space to recognize my grandparents, without whom I would not 
be here and would certainly not be studying in university. Geraldine and Elmer Dize, 
Mom-mom and Pap, with every day that passes I’m reminded of your love and care. 
Here’s to the soft-crab sandwiches and buttered bread. My grandfather always used to ask 
me to “tell him something smart,” I think I’d even struggle with that prompt today. To 
Lora Bolyard, Grandma, I will never forget us playing wiffle ball in your back yard under 
the crab-apple tree. I look forward to our next ride to West Virginia together.  
Last but not least, I want to thank a little sliver of an island in the Caribbean that 
has taught this kid from Baltimore more about himself than any person ever has. Mèsi 
anpil, ché Aiyti 
 
A Note on Translations: 
All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.  
vi 
 
 
Table of Contents 
 
Page 
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………….…….........ii 
 
List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………....vii 
 
Chapter  
 
One: Introduction: Archival Silences and Literary Echoes in Haitian Theater…....….......1 
 
Two: Casting Poets in Christophe’s Court: (Self)-Representations in Juste Chanlatte’s La 
Partie de chasse du roi and L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, en janvier 
1818………………………………………………………………………………………11 
 
Three: Reprising Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Massillon Coicou’s “Prophetic Vision of the 
Past” in L’Empereur Dessalines : Drame en deux actes, en 
vers……………………………………………………………………………………….36 
 
Four: Staging Anti-Colonialism in Fin-de Siècle Haitian Theater: Fort de Joux; ou les 
derniers moments de Toussaint Louverture by Vendenesse Ducasse…………………...59 
 
Five: Conclusion: Parchment Pasts, Digital Futures: The Haitian Theatrical Archive….81 
 
Notes..……………………………………………………………………………………88 
 
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………107  
vii 
 
List of Figures 
 
Figure 2.1 Royal crest of Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers  
Figure 2.2 Frontispiece to LaPartie de chasse du roi, Opéra en trois actes 
Figure 2.3 Royal crest of Henry Christophe. 
Figure 4.1 Toussaint Louverture on his deathbed printed in Fort de Joux, artist unknown. 
Figure 4.2 Frontispiece to Fort de Joux, ou les derniers moments de Toussaint 
Louverture.  
Figure 4.3 Dessalines Ripping the White from the Flag.  
Figure 5.1 Frontispiece to La Partie de chasse du roi, Opéra en trois actes 
Figure 5.2 Almanach royal d’Hayti pour l’année bissextile 1820, Dix-Septième de 
l’indépendance, et la neuvième du règne de sa majesté, présenté au roi, par Buon. 
Figure 5.3 Inscription from inside cover of La Partie de chasse du roi by Juste Chanlatte, 
Comte de Rosiers (1820)  
Figure 5.4 Inscription in Mimola; ou l’histoire d’une cassette (1906) b
1 
Chapter 1 
Introduction: Archival Silences and Literary Echoes in Haitian Theater 
 
Notre littérature menace de dormir en nos cartons, longtemps encore, sûrement, – pour toujours peut-être.  
[Our literature risks sleeping in cardboard boxes, for a longtime, surely, – maybe forever.]1 
– Massillon Coicou 
 
On March 27, 1902, Haitian playwright Vendenesse Estépha Ducasse passed 
away at the exact age of 30. The Port-au-Prince native was classically trained in schools 
established by the Frères de l’Instruction Chrétienne in Bel-Air and Grande Rue and was 
the writer of numerous plays that interrogated the historical and cultural history of Haiti, 
such as Place vacante, Les Duels en mon pays, Noirs et Jaunes, and Toussaint au Fort de 
Joux. The last of these plays is, as Antoine Innocent notes in his introduction to the 
published version of Fort de Joux, the only play by Ducasse to ever be printed and 
published. Innocent, the actor who interpreted the role of Toussaint Louverture, writes 
that Ducasse possessed a unique desire to “faire du théâtre un instrument d’éducation 
publique [make theater an instrument of public education].”2 While the content of these 
plays are lost today, titles such as Noirs et jaunes and Les Duels en mon pays allow us to 
suggest that these works engaged with unresolved tensions that persisted throughout the 
nineteenth century, such as colonialism and political animosity between mulatto and 
noiriste politicians.3 For Ducasse, an imperative clearly exists to blend a sense of history 
on both a local and global scale.4 However, like many other Haitian playwrights whose 
work has disappeared since Haiti declared independence from France in 1804, Ducasse 
and his literary vision have been rendered silent over the course of the last century. This 
study is committed to the process of not only recovering the literary works themselves, 
the physical objects, but also to the analysis of the representations of Haitian history held 
therein. For it is through these theatrical representations of Toussaint Louverture, Jean-
2 
Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe that crucial figures and moments in Haitian 
history begin to be publically contested, in some cases, for the first time. 
The epigraph to this introduction alludes to the fact that Haitian writers were, and 
perhaps have always been, aware that their writings faced the threat of erasure, of being 
subsumed by silences both literary and historical in nature. In his provocative and time-
resistant work Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph 
Trouillot argues that the Haitian Revolution was “unthinkable.” As a result the rich 
history of the western side of Hispaniola became silenced in the scope of world history.5 
To an eighteenth century audience, the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable because of 
the ways in which it challenged both the French and the American Revolutions on 
anticolonial grounds. This incapacity to engage in meaningful ways with Haitian history 
has implications for various fields of inquiry, such as the social sciences and literature.6 
As both Sibylle Fischer and Marlene Daut argue, it is not that the Haitian Revolution was 
never referred to in literature or history, but rather that the anticolonial tenets of the 
revolution have been either suppressed or distorted for the benefit of French and 
American national discourses. Daut argues in her study Tropics of Haiti: Race and the 
Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 that the 
events of the revolution “were perhaps less ‘silenced’ in literal terms than they were 
incessantly narrated in a particularly ‘racialized’ way that had the ultimate effect of 
subordinating the position of the Haitian Revolution to the French and American 
revolutions.”7  
In the field of historical studies, much attention has been drawn to the lapses and 
silences surrounding the placement of the Haitian Revolution in the “Age of 
3 
Revolutions.” 8  However, even though interdisciplinary methods have helped scholars 
comment on the cultural impact of the events of 1791-1804, Haitian theatrical 
representations of the Haitian Revolution have yet to be explored in-depth regarding the 
ways in which the silencing of the Haitian past was contested contemporaneously 
publicly and privately on stage. In a sense, Massillon Coicou was right to say that Haitian 
literature risks sleeping in cardboard boxes, perhaps for a long time, maybe forever.9 This 
act of silencing, I argue, begins in the realm of representation, making theater the 
ultimate tool of contestation. The examination of theater is a means to change the way 
Haitian history and its actors are perceived over time. Furthermore, as Coicou’s assertion 
highlights, the challenge facing Haitian literature at the turn of the nineteenth century is 
two-fold. There is a matter of the archive and the written word itself. The literary objects, 
the physical works themselves, have been spread throughout the world’s libraries and 
archives throughout the past two-hundred years, making the task of recovering Haitian 
literature from their dusty cartons a demanding challenge. Second, there is the written 
archive on Haiti, its revolution, and its literary imprint. These sources have many 
different origins, emanating not only from Haiti, but also from countries throughout the 
globe. In the written archive, the matter of representation becomes a process of vetting 
sources and reconciling literary allegiances forged over time. This introduction will focus 
mainly on the written archive and its influence on representation. I will return to the 
problem of the physical objects and archival challenges of recovering Haitian literature in 
the conclusion of this study.  
In order to understand the ways in which the written archive of the Haitian 
Revolution shapes and molds Haitian history, it is important to start with one of the most 
4 
time-resistant volumes of history, CLR James’s The Black Jacobins: Toussaint 
L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. In his work The Conscripts of Modernity: 
The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, David Scott argues that James’s work is a 
“revolutionary epic,” recounting the violence of the Middle Passage, the reverberations of 
the French Revolution in the colonies, and the events of the only successful slave 
revolution in the Americas. It also outlines, as Scott notes, “the political biography” of 
Toussaint Louverture, who set the stage for the successful end of the Haitian Revolution 
under the leadership of General Jean-Jacques Dessalines.10 While James’s history is still 
one of the most complete histories of the Haitian Revolution, it represents Haitian history 
and its actors solely through the lens of Toussaint Louverture. The revolutionary 
leadership, often referred to as the “Founding Fathers of Haitian Independence,” indeed 
included the likes of Toussaint Louverture, but also Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry 
Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, Moïse Louverture, Sans Souci, and many others. However, 
the way that James chooses to represent Haitian history is through the heroic model of 
Toussaint. James writes:  
Of the men who would lead their brothers to freedom none of them as far as we 
know was yet active. Dessalines, already 40, worked as a slave for his black 
master. Christophe listened to talk in the hotel where he worked but had no 
constructive ideas. Toussaint alone read his Raynal ‘A courageous chief only is 
wanted.’ He said afterwards that, from the time the troubles began, he felt he was 
destined for great things.11 
 
Within the space of five sentences, James elides the importance, military acumen, and 
intellectual capacities of both Dessalines and Christophe. These two men would 
eventually deliver the coup de grâce to Bonaparte’s armies, declare Haitian 
independence, and serve as leaders of the fledgling Haitian nation until 1820. The 
juxtaposition of Toussaint reading and absorbing Enlightenment ideals with Dessalines 
5 
and Christophe performing work, either as forced or voluntary labor, fails to comment on 
the extraordinary feats of the two generals that led them to leave their own imprint on 
Haitian history.  
By heralding Toussaint as the exceptional leader, James produces an imbalanced 
telling of history. Matters of representation worsen when James adds his famous 
appendix to the second edition of The Black Jacobins, in which his incendiary and 
reductive commentary on Dessalines and Christophe has left lasting effects on the Haitian 
Revolution’s written record. When discussing early Haiti, the period immediately 
following independence, James writes:  
Dessalines was a barbarian. After Dessalines came Christophe, a man of 
conspicuous ability and within his circumstances an enlightened ruler. He also did 
his best (a cruel best) with the plantation. But with the abolition of slavery and the 
achievement of independence the plantation, indelibly associated with slavery, 
became unbearable.12 
 
The true impact of these lines has greatly impacted Haitian historiography. They have 
played an active role in silencing or erasing the need for further research into 
Dessalines’s empire or Christophe’s kingdom. By representing these two figures as 
despotic, corrupt, and tyrannical, James summarily neglects their importance in the 
foundation and maintenance of Haitian freedom in its formative years following the final 
defeat of Napoleon’s troops at the Battle of Vertières. The Black Jacobins has other 
problematic aspects, to be sure, but perhaps the most troubling is the establishment of an 
idea of Haitian despotism and political malfeasance.  
 In her recent collection of essays Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake 
Chronicle, Gina A. Ulysse argues that Haiti is caught in a series of ossified and stagnant 
narratives. These narratives range from the stability or instability of its political situation, 
6 
its poverty level, or the fact that Haiti has become a “humanitarian charity case,” – the list 
goes on. Like Ulysse, Sara E. Johnson argues that these narratives are, and have been 
historically, assigned to Haiti against its own will. In her conclusion to The Fear of 
French Negroes, Johnson contends that the colonial denomination for Haiti as the “Perle 
des Antilles” is inextricably connected to its contemporary label as the “poorest country 
in the Western Hemisphere.”13 Johnson and Ulysse aid in understanding how the power 
of representation has historically not been in Haitian hands, as even the example of CLR 
James reveals to a certain extent. Ultimately, Ulysse concludes her own project by 
suggesting that these “new narratives for Haiti” can, and often must, be found in older 
examples of Haitian narratives. This search for new narratives does not only have a 
political praxis, but, like Ducasse’s vision for theater, an educational one as well. How 
might we call upon these plays about Toussaint, Dessalines, and Christophe to contest the 
way Haiti is perceived today? How can these plays disrupt the historiographical violence 
done to Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe? Can these plays be viewed as an 
intervention in the processes of public and private memorialization? What lessons do they 
aim to teach about Haiti and its history? 
Representation: Between History and Memory  
 In her work on the concept of “postmemory,” Marianne Hirsch explores the 
difference between memory and history through the notion of an “embodied experience.” 
In Hirsch’s formulation, postmemory is the “relationship that the generation after those 
who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came 
before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and 
behaviors among which they grew up.”14 The process of postmemory can be seen as a 
7 
means of transmission of history from one generation to the next. She argues that 
“memory signals an affective link between the past,” which allows those who did not 
witness or live a particular experience to incorporate that moment into their memory.15 
This personal, affective link to the past distinguishes itself from history in the sense that it 
allows people to participate in the process of memorialization of a particular moment in 
history. In theater, however, the distinction between memory and history are not as clear, 
because in representing moments of Haitian history, the actors are both embodying 
history and performing an act of memorialization at the same time. Similarly, through 
participating in the spectacle, the audience absorbs the historical representation unfolding 
on stage while partaking in an ephemeral performance of memory.  
 On October 6, 1906, Antoine Innocent took the stage as Jean-Jacques Dessalines 
in Massillon Coicou’s L’Empereur Dessalines for the first and only time. Performed in 
commemoration of the centenary of Dessalines’s assassination, the play reenacts the 
tense political situation among Haiti’s ruling elite that culminated in the murder and 
brutal dismemberment of Haiti’s first emperor. In this example, spectators were 
transported one hundred years into the past to participate in a defining moment in Haiti’s 
history while simultaneously participating in a nationally sanctioned act of memory. In 
this act of postmemory, we can see that the Haitian Revolution and the stories of its main 
actors remained present even in the consciousness of the generations that did not live 
through or witness Haitian independence and other formative moments of the nascent 
Caribbean nation. Even Haitian president Pierre Nord Alexis’s (1902-1908) participation 
in L’Empereur Dessalines as a spectator represents an act of postmemory because 
Dessalines’s assassination took place fourteen years before his birth. 
8 
 Hirsch also raises two other key concerns relating to the process of postmemory 
that resonate with problems facing Haitian theater: the disruption in the transmission of 
stories/narratives and the idea that the transmission of these stories/narratives can exist 
within a context of action and resistance. Before, during, and after the Haitian 
Revolution, Haiti has endured many waves of what Laurent Dubois refers to as 
“aftershocks of history.”16 Whether under the weight of French colonialism, the pressures 
of an indemnity on Haitian independence, the indignity of US occupations that 
bookended the twentieth century, the cruelty of twenty-seven years of repressive 
dictatorial regime, or the devastation of a 7.3 magnitude earthquake, the transmission of 
Haitian history from Haitians has been historically disrupted. Understandably so, the 
stories and narratives present in Haitian theater absorbed the full impact of these 
aftershocks, which then caused the physical object of the text to either be lost or 
destroyed. Due to its interventionist nature and historical positioning, Haitian theater is 
the perfect vehicle to deliver a response to Gina Athena Ulysse’s call for new narratives. 
For this reason, the plays I examine in the chapters that follow are those that have 
received little to no critical attention. In the event that these plays are mentioned, it is 
often in relation to a debate between literary anthologists about their place in a Haitian 
literary canon or to highlight the importance of a historical moment or actor, such as 
Jean-Jacques Dessalines or Défilée Bazile.17 In my analysis, I seek to not only recognize 
Haitian playwrights’s interventions in historical debates, but also explore the literary 
nature of their plays and intellectual careers.  
 Fitting with a mise-en-valeur of theater, the chapters are organized in 
chronological order based on the publication date of the plays and the lives of the 
9 
playwrights. The first chapter considers two operas that Juste Chanlatte penned under the 
reign of Henry Christophe in the Northern Kingdom of Haiti. In this chapter, I 
demonstrate through readings of L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale (1818) and La Partie de 
chasse du roi (1820) that Chanlatte’s theater helps construct a vision of Henry 
Christophe’s Kingdom of Haiti through an embodiment of an anticolonial and antislavery 
ethos. By focusing on Chanlatte’s career as a playwright and as a secretary under 
numerous Haitian premiers, I argue that his political and literary vision provides a new 
way to consider the innovative contributions of secretaries in early Haiti.  
In the second chapter, I analyze Massillon Coicou’s L’Empereur Dessalines: 
drame en deux actes, en vers (1906), focusing particularly on Coicou’s literary vision, 
which I qualify in the Glissantian formulation of a “prophetic vision of the past.” By 
writing a commemorative play about the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, 
Coicou intervenes into the historical record to challenge the elision of Dessalines from 
the Haitian collective memory. Furthermore, I argue that by paying homage to Défilée 
Bazile, Coicou’s work deserves to be evaluated as a feminist intervention in Haitian 
history, one that is too often dominated by figures heralded as fathers, sons, and other 
masculine qualifiers.  
The third chapter focuses on Fort de Joux; ou les derniers moments de Toussaint 
Louverture (1896) by Vendenesse Estépha Ducasse. Given the transnational importance 
of the figure of Toussaint Louverture, I argue that Ducasses’s Toussaint differs from the 
lion’s share of literary representations in that his Toussaint is not just anticolonial, but 
also possesses a potentially “Dessalinian” vision of Haitian governance prior to the defeat 
of the French. In my conclusion, I expand on the future of a Haitian theatrical archive, the 
10 
state of its recovery, and its potential opportunities in the digital turn of humanities and 
Caribbean scholarship. 
 What I aim to lay out in the chapters that follow is both a project of recovery (of 
literary objects, representations, and playwrights) and of resistance that challenges 
contemporary representations of Haiti in the present day. In responding to Gina Athena 
Ulysse’s call for new narratives of Haiti, I argue that these plays provide new ways for 
scholars to interrogate the ossified representations of Haiti that have historically been 
grounded in a colonial or neocolonial political positioning. Lastly, in focusing on 
representation, I insist on the need to evaluate and re-evaluate understudied works of 
Haitian literature that provide us with new ways of thinking about Haiti, its people, its 
history, and its place in the world.  
  
11 
Chapter 2 
Casting Poets in Christophe’s Court: (Self)-Representations in Juste Chanlatte’s La 
Partie de chasse du roi and L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, en janvier 1818 
 
Some of these works have considerable intrinsic merit; and we have therefore resolved to place them before 
our readers, not only because they are so little, if at all, known in this country, but because they were 
written by the descendants of negros [sic], and by the nobles of the late kingdom of Hayti. They will afford 
us a specimen of the literature of that singular nation, and some means of judging of the intellectual dignity, 
which a population of blacks may hope to reach, in the most favorable circumstances. 
  
 The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, “Hayti,” January, 18211  
 
Situating Secretaries in Early Nineteenth-Century Haiti 
On April 28, 1804 Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Governor General of Haiti, gave one 
of the most impassioned speeches of the newly forged nation, declaring, “[…] I have 
saved my country, I have avenged America.”2 Delivered nearly five months after 
declaring Haiti’s independence, this proclamation ultimately delivered the anticolonial 
and antislavery tenor that Dessalines maintained for his two-year term as emperor of 
Haiti until he was assassinated on October 17, 1806. The April 28 speech is a 
collaborative document, drafted with the aid of secretary Juste Chanlatte. Secretaries 
played a major role in the writing of constitutions, declarations, and proclamations in the 
years following Haitian independence. Writers like Juste Chanlatte, Boisrond-Tonnerre, 
B. Aimé, and Pompée-Valentin Baron de Vastey among others were charged with the 
rendering the speeches of Haitian leaders like Dessalines, Henry Christophe, Alexandre 
Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer into textual form. Deborah Jenson points out that the 
process of attributing the conceptual power of such documents to learned secretaries, 
often trained in Paris, leads us to overlook the carefully honed anticolonial, radical 
thought held by early Haitian leaders. If the conceptual power behind these documents 
belongs to the likes of Dessalines, Christophe and Pétion, where are we to locate the 
12 
secretaries? Are they merely conduits for an “official” version of “a Haitian political 
identity and agency that [resonates] on the world stage”?3  
While it is important to highlight the rhetorical ingenuity of Haitian generals and 
early leaders, it is similarly crucial to recognize that political secretaries were not just the 
earliest example of Haitian bureaucrats. Jenson has convincingly argued that it is possible 
to separate Dessalines from his secretaries by tracking his denunciation of epithets such 
as “slaves,” “brigands,” and other tropes typically employed by the French to denigrate 
revolutionaries. Jenson asserts that, “there is a fluid, sustained, and critical structure of 
metaphor in major Dessalinian texts, regardless of secretarial signature.”4  However, if it 
is possible to track a Dessalinian rhetorical strategy, how then are we to evaluate the 
critical and creative rhetorical gestures of his secretaries?5 For this reason, it is crucial to 
analyze not only the writings by these secretaries from a political sphere, but also from a 
creative realm such as poetry and theater. Perhaps one of the most exceptional examples 
of Haitian writers who bridged the gap between political and creative writing is the 
secretary for Dessalines’s “I Avenged America” address, Juste Chanlatte. 
Shifting the focus from Chanlatte the secretary to the poet and playwright is 
complicated and requires historical context in order to understand the various forms of 
Haitian literature that came with independence. Critics like Marlene Daut, Sibylle 
Fischer, Deborah Jenson, and Jean Jonaissant have altered the conception of Haitian 
literary production to include political documents such as constitutions, declarations, 
letters, manifestoes, and proclamations as a crucial contribution to early Haitian 
literature.6 This sort of writing was common, much more so than other literary forms, in 
the early period of Haitian independence. Through works authored and co-authored by 
13 
the likes of Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Christophe, Pétion, and Boyer we come to 
understand the way the each leader circumscribed a particular vision of the Haitian nation 
following the expulsion of the French and the eradication of the institution of colonial 
slavery. While these documents are of invaluable literary and historical import, they are 
not the only examples of literary form(s) from the period of Haitian independence in the 
early nineteenth century. In her influential study Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the 
Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Sibylle Fischer acknowledges there were 
writers like Baron de Vastey and Juste Chanlatte who greatly contributed to the scribal 
politics of the Kingdom of Haiti through myriad writings from poetry to theater, 7 from 
correspondence to manifestoes, and from philosophical treatises to historical studies.8 
However, scholars have often opted to analyze the prose writings of Vastey and 
Chanlatte. How, then, are we to evaluate the theatrical and poetic production in the 
Kingdom of Haiti? Instead of treating the Chanlatte’s secretarial writings as a context for 
the artistic, how might the global political vision of Henry Christophe’s monarchy be 
evoked in his works of theater? 
Deborah Jenson suggests that Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s political philosophy left 
an impact on Juste Chanlatte’s later historical writings, arguing that the secretary 
employs a similar rhetoric when referring to the soulèvement of the “veil of prejudice.”9 
It is convincing enough that through collaboration with Dessalines and other Haitian 
leaders that Chanlatte’s political vision and rhetoric would be similar. However, such a 
connection simplifies Chanlatte’s development as a writer, suggesting that he might have 
been incapable of projecting his own vision of the Haitian nation and the character of 
Haitian anti-colonialism. Chanlatte also falls into a long line of Haitian writers accused of 
14 
copying and borrowing from French literary conventions of the novel, poetry, and theater 
in the nineteenth century.10 In order to question accusations of a mimetic Chanlatte, I 
argue that in his theatrical writings – featuring a blend of poetry and prose – Chanlatte is 
able to construct vision of the Haitian nation and anti-slavery politics independent of that 
which he co-writes in his work as a secretary to Haitian revolutionaries. As we will see in 
political documents like Dessalines’s “I Avenged America” speech, a certain vision of 
the Haitian nation is proposed and constructed. However, just like intentionally fictional 
writing like theater and poetry, this vision is fictional in the sense that it is Dessalines’s 
attempt to project a Haitian past, present, and future. In short, Dessalines’s Haiti is just as 
inventive as Chanlatte’s because it represents a particular vision of the nation from the 
perspective of an individual. By juxtaposing close-readings of Chanlatte’s plays L’Entrée 
du roi en sa capitale en janvier 1818 and La Partie de chasse du roi with an analysis of 
his work under Jean-Jacques Dessalines, we will see how Chanlatte fashions himself as 
not just a literary voice but as an architect for Henri Christophe’s Northern Kingdom of 
Haiti.  
Anticolonial Literature and the Kingdom of Haiti 
 In 1820 The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal published an 
analysis of the writings that emanated from the “late kingdom of Hayti.” The Review 
provides a critical assessment of the kingdom of Haiti using works by Pompée-Valentin, 
Baron de Vastey and Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Roisers as examples of how the kingdom 
of Haiti stood as a legitimate and functioning monarchy. The epigraph to this essay 
affirms the Review’s praise for the intellectual rigor and ingenuity of Vastey and 
Chanlatte’s writing, which reflect a continued need to “repel the reiterated attacks 
15 
[against Haiti’s right to freedom and independence], and expose the still accumulating 
calumnies of the former planters.”11 By reading the Review’s assessment of intellectual 
activity in the Kingdom of Haiti, we can see that Chanlatte plays a major role in the 
scribal politics of the monarchy. Furthermore, through a close-reading of the US 
periodical, we can observe the confluence of colonial and anticolonial discourses in 
writing about Haiti that Chanlatte writes against in his theater. Finally, the Review 
establishes Chanlatte as one of the principle innovators of written Kreyòl through theater. 
Extolling the anticolonial quality of texts produced under Henry Christophe, the 
Boston based Review distinguishes the kingdom as a bulwark against slavery and the 
proposed re-colonization of Haiti by the French. Attempting to refute a hemispheric and 
global perception of Haiti as the enfant terrible of the Americas, the Review claims that 
Henry Christophe has judiciously wielded his “kingly power […] to stifle faction, repel 
aggressors, and give energy, despatch [sic], and secrecy to public measures.”12 From this 
perspective Christophe’s monarchy is a legitimate, and appropriate  – although 
admittedly despotic – system of government. In a similar vein, the Review dispatches the 
clownish and racist critique of a black monarch, “[w]hatever ridicule we may attach to 
the notion of a black arrayed in the splendors of royalty, or decorated with orders of 
knighthood, or wearing the robes and coronets of nobility, we must hold it, particularly in 
all European countries, to be a ridicule misplaced.”13 Nobility, orders of knights, and the 
accompanying regal attire is merely an attribute of monarchy, race has no place in the 
equation.  
 Christophe’s kingdom, however, was not just any manifestation of monarchy; it 
was a pillar of freedom in a world bent on subjugating Haitians. The constant threat of 
16 
colonial retribution and “total extermination” stands as just one of the factors that 
justifies the potentially draconian policies under Christophe.14 Apart from its anticolonial 
political stance, the kingdom of Haiti is viewed as an innovative state. Henry Christophe 
had established a system of education in many principalities, a network of churches, and 
a printing press housed in his favorite residence, the Sans Souci palace. The Imprimerie 
Royale at Sans Souci was the official outlet for publications relating to the Kingdom of 
Haiti, it was also responsible for printing Chanlatte’s plays.15 The Review cites 
Chanlatte’s vaudeville opera L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale as one of the most innovative 
works of Haitian literature because it provides a written trace of Haitian Creole (Kreyòl). 
While there has been much speculation in Haitian historical studies that Christophe 
wished to rid Haiti of French in favor of English, the Review argues that it is the literary 
imagination of Chanlatte, as well as the government support of the printing of his plays, 
makes the case for Kreyòl to become the “vernacular language of the kingdom.”16 The 
linguistic innovation of Juste Chanlatte is, undoubtedly, grounded in the history of 
slavery and creolization that took place in the Caribbean since the onset of colonialism. 
Juxtaposed with the anticolonial vision of Baron de Vastey, Juste Chanlatte’s literary 
power is placed in relief as one of the major writers from the kingdom of Haiti.  
Even though the Review provides an account of early Haitian literary ingenuity, it 
ultimately falls into a virulently racist rhetoric that Marlene Daut refers to as the 
discourse of “monstrous hybridity.”17 This coincidence is not surprising because, 
according to Daut, Vastey himself fell into a similar trap in his remarkable anticolonial 
writings such as Le Système colonial dévoilé. The Review’s analysis of Christophe’s 
legions of soldiers was, itself, a marvel of anticolonial resistance because their “muscular 
17 
strength” and “patience under hunger, thirst, fatigue and exposure […] made them 
superior to whites”18 Such argumentation reveals, as Daut writes, “how a racialized 
debate sparked and encouraged by pseudoscientific debates about ‘race’ permeated nearly 
every discussion of the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth century.”19 While The North 
American Review and Miscellaneous Journal paradoxically produced commendable 
reasoning towards the legitimacy and vision of Christophe’s monarchy, it ultimately 
digresses into a similar realm of racist reasoning through an adaptation of 
pseudoscientific terms of “race.” Amidst these murky waters of racialized language, how 
might we recuperate Juste Chanlatte and the Haitian literary imagination effused in his 
plays? Is Chanlatte’s dramatic representation of the Christophe’s monarchy similar to this 
sympathetic American article? 
Staging Juste Chanlatte or the Comte de Rosiers 
Throughout his career as a man of letters in Haiti, Juste Chanlatte often wore 
many hats. From his work as a secretary under Jean-Jacques Dessalines to his role as 
official librarian and accountant under Henry Christophe to his unofficial roles as poet 
and playwright, Chanlatte had to adjust with the shift in political structure in Haiti from 
an empire to a monarchy.20 We can similarly see this change in Chanlatte’s name change 
as he takes on the title of “Count of Rosiers” from 1811 to 1820 (see Figure 2.1). In order 
to distinguish between the multiple stages of Chanlatte’s writing career it is crucial to 
understand how the work he produced restages a Dessalinian rhetoric. Chanlatte’s work 
as a rhetorical understudy of Dessalines is crucial for Chanlatte’s career as a poet and 
playwright because it is in this work that he shifts from Juste Chanlatte the secretary to 
Son Excellence Monsieur le Comte de Rosiers.21 Chanlatte’s ascension from bureaucrat to 
18 
one of the highest representatives of Haitian letters required a change in medium, 
political texts to fiction, rather than a shift in content. I insist that the political tone of 
Chanlatte’s plays maintain an acutely anticolonial and anti-slavery tenor as they represent 
a similar imagined Haiti as previously articulated in Jean-Jacques Dessalines “I Avenged 
America speech.” 
 
Figure 2.1 Royal crest of Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers22 
 
 In the first lines of his April 28 Proclamation Jean-Jacques Dessalines declares, 
“[L]es implacables ennemis des droits de l’homme ont subi le châtiment dû à leurs crimes 
[the relentless enemies of the rights of man have received the necessary punishment for 
their crimes.]”23 Nearly six months after winning the final battle against the French and 
almost five months after declaring Haitian independence, Dessalines reminded the 
Haitian people that they no longer live under the yoke of colonial slavery. This speech 
endows the act of declaring independence, and avenging America, with a paradigm 
shifting quality. From now on, “jamais aucun colonne mettra le pied sur ce territoire, à 
titre de maître ou de propriétaire ; cette résolution sera désormais la base de notre 
19 
constitution [never again will a colonial or a European set foot on this land with the title 
of owner. This resolution will, from now on, be the foundational base of our 
constitution.]”24 The shift from colonial slavery to freedom, the renaming of Saint-
Domingue as Haiti, and the establishment of an anticolonial and anti-slavery clause in the 
Haitian constitution concretizes a new understanding of freedom in the Americas.  
While the ideas of freedom in the April 28 proclamation have been convincingly 
attributed to Dessalines, Juste Chanlatte certainly had a hand in the writing process and 
we can see the effects of this collaboration in his work as a playwright. The metaphorical 
edification of freedom in Dessalines’s proclamation is one of the first images we see in 
Chanlatte’s play L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, en janvier 1818.25 In the description of 
the stage decorations Chanlatte places a physical representation of Haitian independence 
that reigns over the entire play:  
Scène première.  
La scène se passe sur la Place de la Fossette. Du côté droit est un Limonadier, du 
côté gauche est un Restaurateur. Au milieu du fond du théâtre s’élève une 
Colonne consacrée à l’Indépendance, et ornée des attributs de cette Déesse. 
 
[First Scene. 
The scene takes place in the Place de la Fossette. On the right is a Café Owner 
and on the left is a restaurateur. In the middle of the back of the theater a Column 
dedicated to independence rises up, decorated with the attributes of this 
Goddess.]26 
 
 The column dedicated to Independence is a physical representation of the ideas first 
expressed by Dessalines in the April 28 Proclamation. In the form of an obelisk Haiti has 
constructed its own monuments, celebrating freedom from the French and the end of 
slavery. This image of manufactured monuments contrasts with the natural imagery in 
Dessalines’s text: “A ce signal, qu’un Dieu juste a provoqué, vos mains, saintement 
armées, ont porté la hache sur l’arbre antique de l’esclavage et des préjugés [on this 
20 
signal, that a just God has provoked, your hands, saintly armed, have taken the hatchet to 
the ancient tree of slavery and prejudice.]”27 The natural order, “a just God,” allows the 
Haitian masses to strike down the system of slavery by cutting down the “ancient tree of 
slavery and prejudice” that the French planted in Saint-Domingue in 1627. These two 
images, slavery as natural and Haitian independence as man-made, contrasts with the 
famous “tree of liberty” that Toussaint Louverture spoke of during his deportation to 
France.28 While Dessalines’s metaphor does not mention the need to uproot this tree, 
preventing it from growing back, he insists that French colonialism will never come back 
because only “pure air of august and triumphant liberty” blows through Haiti. We see, 
therefore, how Dessalines imagines Haiti’s future as both anticolonial and antislavery, 
effectively effacing the remnants of these French institutions through independence. This 
is the soil, the bedrock on which Chanlatte grounds his stage decorations dedicated to 
Haitian independence.  
 We see the importance of Haitian independence, and the Dessalinian era in one of 
the final scenes of the play, when a cast of characters appear as allegories for moments in 
Haitian history. While the characters refer to the reign of Henry Christophe, we can see 
how Chanlatte’s collaboration with Dessalines shines through into this fictional Northern 
Kingdom of Haiti. The characters in scene seven provide us with allegories of different 
moments in Haitian history, dating back to the first moment of colonial contact by 
Christopher Columbus: an Amazon woman and her child, a father, a mother, a young 
warrior, a young Haitian woman, and an elderly man. While there are twentieth century 
playwrights like Édouard Glissant who would later make reference to indigenous 
characters in Saint-Domingue, the scene in Chanlatte’s play differs in that it does not 
21 
involve spiritual incarnations of these representations or flashing backwards or forwards 
in time. In this way, we can see how Dessalines’s vision of the Americas has influenced 
Chanlatte’s conception of Henry Christophe’s fictional kingdom in the play.  
In spite of the eradication of the Amerindian population of Hispaniola from the 
sixteenth to the seventeenth century, the Amazon woman is presented with her son. For 
her and her child Haiti – the pre-colonial Taino Arawak name for Hispaniola – stands as a 
bulwark against centuries of colonial violence that pushed the Amerindians towards 
extinction.29 The Amazon woman transposes this Dessalinian sentiment to the Kingdom 
of Haiti as she teaches her son the importance of history:  
Nos mères avaient pleuré, nos pères avaient fremi [sic], nos époux nageaient dans 
leur propre sang, c’en était fait enfin de la triste patrie, lorsqu’un héros, le grand 
Henry nous a tendu une main sécourable [sic], et sur les débris du [sic] l’odieux 
sceptre des français [sic] a élevé cette Colonne à l’Indépendance. Viens, 
approche, cher enfant, que mes flancs ont porté, que ce sein généreux a nourri, 
regarde bien ce monument (en lui montrant la Colonne à l’Indépendance) jure 
moi de le défendre jusqu’au dernier soupir. 
 
Our mothers had cried, our fathers had trembled in fear, our husbands bathed in 
their own blood, which was the result of a woeful country, when a hero, the great 
Henry lent us a helping hand and on top of the debris of the odious scepter of the 
French raised this Column in the memory of Independence. Come closer, dear 
child, that I carried in my womb, that my generous breast nourished, take a good 
look at this monument (showing him the Column in the memory of Independence) 
and promise me to defend it until you breathe your last breath.30 
 
While the play syncretizes the process of Haitian independence and attributes it to the 
legacy of Henry Christophe, the symbolic impact of this interaction between the 
Amazonian woman and her son is remarkable. First, independence is grounded in the 
sorrow of former generations who lived under the colonial French regime in Saint-
Domingue. It is from the debris of colonialism that Haiti was born, effectively avenging 
the generations of Taino Arawaks who were killed over the course of three centuries. 
22 
Finally, Haitian independence is a fecund moment, where subsequent generations born 
free of slavery and colonialism will help protect the liberty fought for and won over the 
course of thirteen years of revolution. The other characters also help to echo a 
Dessalinian rhetoric where the young warrior evokes the war for independence 
suggesting that freedom is built on the remains of the Haitians who fought to the death, 
the father refers to the scars of slavery and therefore grounds Haitian independence in an 
antislavery sentiment, and the mother evokes female participation in the war for 
independence as nurses, warriors, and defenders of the liberty that will prevent the rape 
and kidnapping of future generations of Haitians. The edification of Haitian 
independence might seem to be a singular act by Christophe, but at least on Chanlatte’s 
stage it requires a cast of characters to fully erect the monument to Haitian freedom and 
anti-colonialism.  
 Similarly to the stage decorations in L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, en janvier 
1818, Juste Chanlatte’s La Partie de chasse du roi features a monument to Haitian 
independence. Unlike in L’Entrée, however, this monument takes on a different physical 
form: 
Acte premier. 
Le théâtre représente une place pratiquée au milieu d’une forêt. Au fond s’élève une 
pyramide champêtre consacrée à l’indépendance. Du côté droit est l’autel de la Patrie, du 
côté gauche l’autel de la Liberté. De jeunes haytiennes [sic], mêlées avec un bataillon du 
corps des Royal Dahomets, (1) dansent autour des trophées qu’elles ont élevés, et 
célèbrent gaiment la veille de la fête de l’indépendance. 
(1) Nom d’une nation guerrière de l’Afrique donné à la milice du Royaume. 
Act One. 
The theater represents a gathering area in the middle of a forest. In the rear a rustic 
pyramid dedicated to independence rises up. To the right is the altar of the Patrie, to the 
left is the altar of Liberty. Young Haitian women, mixed with a battalion of the Royal 
Dahomets, dance around the trophies they’ve erected, gaily celebrating the eve of 
Independence Day.31 
23 
 
Rather than in the Place de la Fossette in Cap Henry this monument is in the middle of a 
forest, and it takes the form of a pyramid rather than a column, grounding Haitian 
independence in both Haitian and Egyptian cultural expressions. 32 In his Essai sur les 
causes de la revolution et des guerres civiles Baron de Vastey also praises the cultural 
proximity between the Haitian and African monarchies when he describes the completion 
of the palace od Sans Souci:  
This year we witnessed the completion of the palace of Sans Souci and the royal 
church of that town [Milot]. These two structures, erected by the descendants of 
Africans, show that we have not lost the architectural taste and genius of our 
ancestors who coered Ethiopia, Egypt, Carthage, and Old Spain, with their superb 
monuments.33 
 
For Vastey, as well, the edification of the Haitian monarchy is irrevocably linked to an 
African architectural and artistic tradition. 
 
Figure 2.2 Frontispiece to La Partie de chasse du roi, Opéra en trois actes (1820) 
24 
Sibylle Fischer discusses the notion of Caribbean Egyptocentrism in relation to the 
aesthetics of Cuban carpenter José Antonio Aponte’s fabled book of revolutionary 
images. She writes: “Caribbean Egyptocentrism would be an outstanding example of a 
modern syncretism where emancipatory ideas that originated in the plantation zone and 
European notions of history entered into contact and congealed into a political practice of 
liberation…”34 In Chanlatte’s stage directions we have a nearly contemporaneous 
example of this “modern syncretism” wherein the two prominent cultural referents are 
Egyptian (the pyramid) and Haitian (the vaudoesque ceremony in the forest as well as the 
altars to the patrie and liberty). The characters, like in L’Entrée, add to the significance of 
the décor. In the ceremony young Haitian women dance with members of the Royal 
Dahomets, the royal militia under Henry Christophe, while they sing praises to “Papa 
Henry” the founder of the Haitian nation in Kreyòl. The Alamanch Royal d’Hayti of 1820 
lists the members of the Royal Dahomets, a royal guard under Christophe named after the 
former African kingdom, which gives a certain verisimilitude to Chanlatte’s literary 
representation.35 By having the Royal Dahomets dance partake in this vaudouisant 
ceremony, Chanlatte evokes, again, the fecundity of the Haitian monarchy and inscribes 
the roots of monarchy in Africa rather than in Europe. This is also indicative of the 
misreading of Chanlatte’s theater as mimetic of European literary conventions because 
this scene is resistant to European theatrical tropes of exoticism. The act of 
circumscribing Chanlatte within French-language theater is to deny it of the syncretic 
nature of its cultural content and linguistic forms. It is more appropriate to approach 
Chanlatte’s work as a Caribbean cultural production, examining its creolized and 
25 
syncretic elements in order to understand the way that his plays characterize the 
multicultural landscape of the Kingdom of Haiti.  
Poetic (Self-)Representations and Chanlatte’s Poetic Domain 
 While the paratextual elements of Chanlatte’s plays help to expand our notion of 
what the Kingdom of Haiti looks like, his plays extoll the virtues of the monarchy 
through poetic scripts. There is both a poetic nature to the script in the sense that 
Chanlatte often writes in verse, but more directly, some lines are treated and presented as 
poems by characters in the plays themselves. This inclusion of poetry in the kingdom 
provides an imaginative challenge to the role of written word under Christophe’s reign, 
especially in the kingdom that Chanlatte represents on stage. Even though Chanlatte was 
Paris educated, the majority of Haitians after independence had varying levels of literacy, 
which was a skill they were denied under colonial slavery. As Deborah Jenson has 
pointed out in her work on Toussaint Louverture, the intrepid general was able to read 
and write in French a well as dictate high volumes of letters to his secretaries in order to 
shape the perception of his administration during the Haitian Revolution.36 By including 
poetry, a scriptural element to his various representations of the Kingdom of Haiti, 
Chanlatte imbues Christophe’s monarchy with the emancipatory notion of literacy. As 
part of the theatrics of this gesture, Chanlatte casts himself as the poet in both L’Entrée 
du roi en sa capital and La Partie de chasse du roi, providing Juste Chanlatte with an 
opportunity to inscribe himself within the Kingdom of Haiti as a integral and visible 
emissary of the monarchy.  
 In the first scene of La Partie de chasse du roi during the ceremony around the 
monument to independence, the character named Vié Bayacou joins the Captain of the 
26 
Royal Dahomets and other soldiers in giving praise to the King for having liberated Haiti 
from the French. Unlike the soldiers, however, Vié Bayacou speaks Kreyòl to the crowd. 
While this may, at first, seem like a class division where high-ranking soldiers speak 
French and other Haitians speak Kreyòl the relationship between the two languages are 
more complicated. Vié Bayacou, after being urged by the crowd, begins to sing in 
rhyming French verse: 
Sing the glory 
Of the Royal Dahomet 
Without sorcery 
Bares the musket 
And into obscurity 
Dives every statuette 
 
In warlike engagement 
Tis not a real goblin 
Of thrust, of measurement 
Yet he struts plain 
And for many a monument 
Tis a rampart certain. 
 
When disrespected 
The Devil is kinder; 
He is ceaselessly angered 
As witnesses of hellfire 
When the slavers showed 
Him the shackles ironed. 
[…] 
Throne and patrie 
Such is his refrain; 
Laws, industry, 
Tis his unique pain: 
And his battery 
Oh! Tis, his gain… 
Chantons la gloire 
Du Royal Dahomet ; 
Sans nu [sic] grimoire  
Il porte le mousquet  
Et dans l’onde noire  
Plonge tout marmouset  
 
Dans les batailles  
C’est pis [sic] un vrai lutin  
D’estoc, de taille 
Il fait voir son latin, 
Et pour nos murailles  
C’est un rempart certain. 
 
Quand on l’outrage 
Mieux vaut un lucifer [sic] ; 
Il fait des rages  
Qu’on ne voit qu’aux enfers 
Quand de l’esclavage  
On lui montre les fers.  
[…] 
Trône et patrie,  
Voilà tout son refrain ; 
Lois, industrie, 
C’est son unique frein :  
Et sa batterie 
Est, ma foi ! tout son train…37 
Revealing his linguistic range from Kreyòl to French, Vié Bayacou presents a creolized 
narrative of Henry Christophe’s rise to the throne in the Kingdom of Haiti. His song 
begins by shifting the significance of the Royal Dahomets (the group) to the Royal 
Dahomet (single soldier, but also the individual kingdom). In this formulation Vié 
Bayacou distinguishes between the military force and royalty, the monarch Henry 
Christophe. What follows is a blend of images and references to spirituality, war, art, and 
27 
architecture that take on new meaning in Christophe’s patrie. The battle for independence 
with muskets combines with images of gothic architecture and the supernatural (goblins, 
grotesque statuettes, spell books, hell, and Lucifer) as a rejection of the colonial order. 
These elements stand as the syncretic product of a fight for Haitian independence that 
signifies not only the birth of a new nation, but also the refusal of the yoke of slavery. In 
the third stanza, Christophe’s rage, as some historiography refers to as his “despotism,” is 
a product of the colonial, slaveholding world attempting to “show him the irons [of 
servitude].” While I have not cited Vié Bayacou’s song in whole, the next lines trouble 
Christophe’s despotism, suggesting that the kingdom and the fatherland are founded on 
principles of law and industry. However, unlike during the colonial epoch, the laws and 
industry are grounded in a unified front against slavery and colonialism.  
 As we have seen with Dessalines, such an anticolonial rhetoric is characteristic of 
writing from early Haiti, however, rather than through political writing, Chanlatte uses 
poetry to evoke similar ideals. Poetry is a major element of Chanlatte’s theater, 
particularly as it relates to the character of the poet. In L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, 
Chanlatte casts himself as the poet, who, throughout the course of the play hands each 
character a song to sing in praise of Henry Christophe. In terms of the plot, the play tells 
the story of Henry Christophe’s royal tour of the kingdom in 1814, where the monarch 
visited each province in order to meet the Haitian people.38 The songs and poetry sung in 
L’Entrée are meant to set the stage for this visit, which is ostensibly an afterthought 
because the king and his royal retinue only appear for a brief moment at the end of the 
play. In this sense, the play itself can be seen as a poetic fashioning of Christophe’s 
kingdom as a symbol, rather than producing a concrete representation of the king himself. 
28 
By not providing elaborate descriptions of Christophe or the physical appearance of the 
kingdom, Chanlatte is able to characterize the monarchy in terms of abstract concepts 
such as politics, ideology, and even poetics. In the same way, we get a palpable sense of 
the role the poet plays in fashioning the Kingdom of Haiti, which, in turn, establishes the 
poet as the ultimate creator of what Doris Sommer refers to as “foundational fictions.”39  
While Christophe is heralded as the founding father of Haiti in L’Entrée – and in 
La Partie de chasse du roi for that matter, Chanlatte can be seen as an architect who 
constructs a fictional kingdom. Similarly to the hemispheric vision of the “I Avenged 
America” speech, Chanlatte’s character, the poet named Damis, refers to Christophe as 
the “first Sovereign of the New World.”40 Damis’s first poem emphasizes the 
significance of a monarchy founded on anti-slavery legislation: 
He still wants, for all the American lands 
To adore a new monarch, 
He says, and his heroic and Herculean hands 
Give birth to this work 
His voice travels like lightning’s power 
Everything trembles, and the abyss howls 
With one single blow, reduces all to powder 
The tyrant who rules and growls. 
 
The most ardent patriotism 
The crown is the right price for he, 
And the refrain of heroism 
Is: live, forever, live Henry! 
 
For our ancient oppressors, 
We needed, of our own race 
A monarch legislator. 
Who other than he 
Knew to vindicate our rights? 
Honor, to this king, honor to thee! 
Let us live or die for his legal foresights. 
Clio will tell the story 
Of this hero, her majesty 
We say, beauty of love, of glory, 
Live, forever, yes, live Henry! 
Il veut encore, et soudain l’Amérique  
Adore un souverain nouveau,  
Il dit, et ses mains héroiques [sic] 
D’Hercule enfantent les travaux. 
A sa voix sillonne la foudre, 
Tout tremble, et le gouffre mugit…. [sic] 
D’un seul geste il réduit en poudre 
Le tyran qui roule et rugit. 
 
Du plus ardent patriotisme 
La Couronne est le digne prix, 
Et le refrain de l’héroïsme  
Est : vive, à jamais, vive Henry ! 
 
Pour nos antiques oppresseurs,  
Il nous fallait, de notre race 
Un Monarque législateur.  
Quel autre semblable  
Eût su revendiquer nos droits ?  
Honneur à ce roi véritable !  
Vivons ou mourons pour ses lois. 
Clio racontera l’histoire  
De ce héros son favori,  
Nous disons, beaux d’amour, de gloire, 
Vive, à jamais, oui, vive Henry ! 41 
Sung to the air of A L’Univers la tyrannie, Damis’s poem situates the kingdom of Haiti 
within colonial America. His heroism in battle notwithstanding, Damis praises 
29 
Christophe’s role as a monarque légisalteur [legislative monarch]. Two major elements 
of Chanlatte’s theater surface in these lines: an attention to legal discourses of 
anticolonialism and the racial implications of a hemispheric vision of the Americas. First, 
the significance of law cannot be understated here because since Columbus’s native 
voyage Europe has sought to legislate the Americas.42 Although Christophe was not the 
first to create anticolonial or antislavery laws in the Americas, the fact that legal 
discourse figures into Chanlatte’s poetry is nonetheless striking. In this way, we can see 
that Chanlatte commemorates a particularly Christophean legal precedent that can be 
found in legal documents and historical sources like Christophe’s Manifeste du roi.43 
Second, as Chris Bongie suggests, Juste Chanlatte possesses a hemispheric vision of the 
Americas, wherein the oppressed – whether Amerindian, African, or Creole – constitute a 
unified people or race rather than a racially divided caste system. Even though Chanlatte 
was part of group of gens de couleur libres during the Haitian Revolutionary period, the 
lines quoted above make no reference to such colonial or racialist categories in this 
theatrical Kingdom of Haiti. It would also be intellectually irresponsible, as I 
demonstrated above in relation to the North American Review and Miscellaneous 
Journal, to generate a discussion of Chanlatte’s race in relation to his intellectual work as 
though it spoke to a particular racial allegiance. In perhaps the most iconic lines of this 
poem, Chanlatte recasts the Dessalinian maxim “Freedom or death” as “Live or die for 
[Christophe’s] laws” suggesting that legal status is a more concrete definition of 
freedom.44 
 If L’Entrée provides us with a political vision of the Kingdom of Haiti and its 
innovative, legal anticolonialism, then La Partie de chasse du roi generates a mythical 
30 
representation of the monarchy through the mise-en-abîme of a poetic idylle dialoguée. 
By inscribing Haiti within a rustic idyll Chanlatte is able to, like the later scenes of 
L’Entrée, project an image of the subjects of the Haitian monarchy. Through this literary 
construction that Chanlatte is also able to allude to the Henry Christophe’s symbol of 
nobility featuring a phoenix carrying the inscription “je renais de mes cendres [I am 
borne again from my ashes],” referring to the birth of the kingdom post-revolution (see 
figure 2.3).45 
 
 
 
Figure 2.3 The royal crest of Henry Christophe.46 
 
Unlike the Imprimerie Royale printing of L’Entrée, La Partie de chasse du roi 
does not list the actors’ names. However, given that Chanlatte casts himself as the poet in 
the former play, it is fair to suggest that he casts himself as the poetic magister du village 
[village teacher] in La Partie de chasse du roi. In creating his idyllic image of the rustic 
villages of the kingdom, Chanlatte is able to construct the Kingdom of Haiti “from 
31 
below” rather than focusing on the interplay between the king and his court.47 In the 
magister’s idyll allegorical characters of the peasantry (a shepherd and his daughter) and 
nobility (a knight and his son) cross paths in the far reaches of the Haitian kingdom. The 
interaction between peasantry and nobility projects a notion of equality in Christophe’s 
kingdom, where the shepherd’s daughter is a perfect match for the knight’s son. While 
the negotiation of their unity is highly gendered, brokered between the two father figures, 
it represents the benefits of a modified system of feudalism in the Haitian monarchy.  
The utopic match between peasantry and nobility is not just a convention derived 
from the genre of the idyll, but rather, it is part of the magister’s and, in turn, Chanlatte’s 
poetic performance for the king in the play and Henry Christophe as a spectator present 
in the royal theater. The shepherd’s daughter’s song professes “fidelity,” “sincerity,” and 
“sacrifice” presenting herself as the ideal royal subject and match for a knight who has 
pledged his life to the protection of the king.48 Her fidelity and gratitude towards the king 
is the source of her upward mobility, her potential acceptance into the royal court. Even 
though the shepherd and his daughter have a tremendous amount of admiration for 
royalty and nobility, the knight and his son are equally gracious towards the peasantry. 
Effusing their praise for the “rustic meal” and the daughter’s charming songs, the knight 
recognizes the worthiness of the peasantry class. In a final test of their fidelity to the 
monarch and his kingdom, the shepherd notices the knight dons royal seal of the king: 
A ces signes certains, à cette noble marque 
Je reconnais l’oiseau cher à notre monarque, 
Le Phénix, en un mot. 
 
[Of these symbols, of this noble mark 
I recognize the bird dear to our monarch 
In short, The Phoenix.]49 
  
32 
The presentation of gracious royal subjects – peasant and noble alike – the magister is 
able to win the favor of his king. Following the idyllic dialogue the king responds to the 
performance: 
Bravo ! bravo ! M. le Magister, votre idylle réussira : j’aime beaucoup ce genre et 
la manière dont vous l’avez traité. Malgré tout le sel et l’agrément dont on sait, à 
la cour, assaisonner ses propos, on en revient toujours au langage des bergers. 
Quelle est belle et touchante ta Cloé ! Quel intérêt elle inspire ! c’est que ses 
discours comme son âme, sont sans apprêts et sans imposture. L’énigme du 
Phénix me plait fort : c’est un hommage délicat à votre Roi. Il en sentira, croyez-
moi, le prix, et en attendant le Magister : (tirant une bourse d’or de chaque main.) 
Voilà pour le Phénix, et voilà pour Cloé. 
 
[Bravo! Bravo! M. the Magister, your idyll will be a success: I really love this 
genre and the manner in which you have treated it. In spite of the glitz and glitter 
that we are used to in the court, we always go back to the language of shepherds. 
She is so beautiful and touching, your Cloé! She inspires such interest! It’s just 
hat her speech, like her soul, is without artifice and perfidy. The enigma of the 
Phoenix greatly pleases me: it’s a delicate homage to your king. He shall feel it, 
believe me, the price, and in waiting for the Magister: (handing [the Magister] a 
piece of gold in each hand. Here, for the Phoenix and for Cloé.]50 
 
The king is not only pleased by the genre of the idyllic dialogue, but the language and the 
images that it evokes. The “shepherd’s language” or the language of the people is viewed 
as the most virtuous register and the ideal language for the kingdom because even the 
king “comes back to the shepherd’s language.” The dialogue is capable of erasing the 
seemingly arbitrary hierarchization in the kingdom through a common tongue. This scene 
is exceptionally self-referential in the sense that Chanlatte creates a dialogue between two 
kings and two poets. The first is the magister and the fictional king, who later pays the 
poet for his artistic creation. Then, there is Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers and the real 
Henry Christophe watching La Partie de chasse du roi in his very court. By establishing 
a dramatic rapport between the king and the poet, Chanlatte is able to inscribe himself 
first and foremost as the kingdom’s official poet. Not only does Chanlatte establish 
33 
himself as the court’s official poet, but his poetry also allows him to define the king – 
through the image of the phoenix – and his subjects. Functioning not only as a vehicle for 
his vision of Haiti, but also as an outlet for his poetry, theater grants Chanlatte noble 
social status in Henry Christophe’s kingdom while also ensuring his place among the 
noble ranks of Haitian literature and theatrical production. 
Literature in Early Haiti and Silences 
As I have mentioned above, critics have recently expanded our vision of what 
constitutes literature in the early stages of Haitian independence. According to Deborah 
Jenson and Sibylle Fischer, this is an imperative gesture if we are to address the elision of 
Haiti in historiography as well as in cultural and literary studies. Not only does this help 
to understand the way Haiti fostered new notions of freedom and modernity in the 
Americas and on a global scale, but by studying works such as constitutions, speeches, 
and correspondence allow us to reconstruct the political philosophies of the historically 
misunderstood leaders of early Haiti like Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe. 
This is a crucial, and necessary endeavor. However, in seeking to uncover the voices of 
early Haitian leaders, other voices are inevitably silenced and relegated to the margins of 
Haitian intellectualism.  
Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out in his magisterial text Silencing of the Past: 
Power and Production of History that any attempt to attribute a voice to a historical 
figure (creating a mention) ineluctably silences another’s voice.51 For this reason, there 
are archival and historical consequences when we attempt to wholly attribute documents 
that were collaboratively created, such as Dessalines’s “I Avenged America” speech, to 
one author. Just as a dismissal of Dessalines’s literary ingenuity would marginalize his 
34 
role early Haitian radical thought, to definitively assign authorship to Dessalines would 
be to deny Juste Chanlatte’s influence on early Haitian anticolonial rhetoric. 
 As I have demonstrated in Chanlatte’s plays L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale and 
La Partie de chasse du roi, Chanlatte effuses an anti-colonial and anti-slavery rhetoric in 
theatrical representations of the Kingdom of Haiti. As Chris Bongie argues in his work on 
Juste Chanlatte’s history of the Haitian Revolution Le Cri de la nature, the resilient 
secretary-poet-historian possesses a hemispheric vision of Americanness also present in 
the speeches he collaborated on with Dessalines. Bongie traces Chanlatte’s appropriation, 
or “haitianization” to evoke Aimé Césaire’s La Tragédie du roi Christophe, and 
modifications of French literary conventions in “I Avenged America” and Le Cri de la 
nature.52 While Bongie seems to challenge Deborah Jenson’s assignment of the 1804 
speech to Dessalines, I argue that they are complimentary.53 Their attempts to track 
Dessalinian and Chanlattean motifs are part of the same venture of understanding early 
Haitian poetics. Going forward, rather than attributing any one text to one author, our 
goal should be a rigorous tracking of literary stylistics and poetics in early Haitian texts 
in order to reveal the ways in which particular voices distinguish themselves from, 
collaborate with, and engage with one another to construct a collective early Haitian 
poetics. Unavoidably so, a crucial element of this critical work is grounded in an analysis 
of Chanlatte’s theater where we have unhindered access to Chanlatte’s literary poetics.  
  
35 
Chapter 3 
Reprising Jean-Jacques Dessalines: Massillon Coicou’s “Prophetic Vision of 
the Past” in L’Empereur Dessalines : Drame en deux actes, en vers 
 
L’idée dont je suis travaillé de resserrer de plus en plus le lien moral, le lien naturel qui unit, qui doit 
toujours unir la France et Haïti, m’a fait saisir avec un cordial empressement l’occasion qui m’est 
aujourd’hui donnée de montrer la filiation de l’une par rapport à l’autre.  
 
[I have labored to hone in on, as close as possible, the moral and natural elements that unite, that must 
always unite France and Haiti, this idea has led me to take advantage of today’s momentous occasion to 
elucidate the filiation of one in relation to the other.]1 
 
Massillon Coicou, Le Génie français et l’âme haïtienne (1904) 
 
On July 23, 1903, serving in Paris at the Haitian diplomatic ministry, Massillon 
Coicou gave a speech at the Mairie de Paris on the kindred ties between France and 
Haiti. In his address, Coicou enumerates various French thinkers, poets, and novelists 
who have contributed to rendering Haiti legible on the other side of the Atlantic. Stating 
that his expressed goal of this conférence was to trace the influence of the French 
imaginary on the Haitian spirit, the nationalist poet applauds the efforts of these French 
figures and their century-long effort to liberate Haiti from the shackles of French colonial 
thought. It is, nonetheless, problematic that as a nationalist poet, Coicou appears to be 
effusing unrelenting praise towards French abolitionists and artists rather than to the 
Haitian masses that marched with Jean-Jacques Dessalines to the final defeat of colonial 
rule one hundred years earlier, in November 1803. Coincidentally, Coicou’s literary 
legacy has been subject to similarly hasty readings when, in fact, the poet-diplomat 
makes a much more subtle gesture.  
Writing at the turn of the century, Massillon Coicou’s bibliographical Paris 
speech seeks to expose to the French, the numerous utterances of Haiti, its genius and 
revolutionary spirit in the French imaginary. His maîtrise of the French literary history, 
culture, and aesthetics was similar to the approach adopted later by leaders of Negritude 
36 
Aimé Césaire, Léon Gontran Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor as they began to 
dismantle the French colonial past in their myriad writings.2 Given the exceptional nature 
of Coicou’s decolonial rhetoric, how has his legacy fallen out of the purview of 
contemporary literary, historical, and cultural studies scholars? In addressing this 
question I engage with Édouard Glissant’s theatrical gesture of a “prophetic vision of the 
past,” which he outlines in the preface to his play Monsieur Toussaint.3 While I do not 
mention Glissant’s play at length in this chapter, I contend that Massillon Coicou adopts 
a similar literary stance as a poet-historian in his play L’Empereur Dessalines: Drame en 
deux actes en vers. 
Perhaps one of the most pertinent ways of interpreting the elision of Massillon 
Coicou and his works from the Haitian (literary) imagination is through what Michel-
Rolph Trouillot referred to as the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution and its legacy. As 
literary and historical scholars have engaged with Trouillot we have seen that there were 
active efforts to suppress, neologize, and promote particular versions of the Haitian 
Revolution that has pervaded nearly every aspect of Western culture for the past two 
centuries.4 As far as the “silencing” of Coicou is concerned, he fuses his literary output 
with Haiti’s past, rendering himself vulnerable to the same processes of forgetting and 
effacement that Trouillot outlines in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of 
History. These processes, described in terms of erasure and banalization, are the result of 
the work of a more general public and specialists. The questions then become: How is 
Massillon Coicou written into, or out of the literary legacy of the Haitian Revolution and 
how might an inclusion of Coicou’s writing challenge the current representations of the 
Haitian Revolution and its aftermath?  
37 
One of the central figures in the work of Massillon Coicou is the revolutionary 
general, and the first emperor of Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In a number of his 
poems and his only printed play, L’Empereur Dessalines : Drame en deux actes, en vers 
(1906), Coicou fixates on the assassination of Dessalines because it represents, for him, 
one of the most formative moments in Haiti’s national memory and consciousness. As a 
poet and playwright, Coicou’s fixation on the Haitian Revolution is significant in the 
sense that the cultural impact of the revolution remains salient one hundred years later. In 
memory studies, Marianne Hirsch refers to this phenomenon as the “generation of 
postmemory,” where the generations not directly involved in the trauma of historical 
events act as the conduits, the means of contemporary transmission of a particular 
cultural past.5 In transmitting the events of Dessalines’s assassination to generations of 
Haitians who never lived under Haiti’s first emperor, Coicou generates a certain 
“presence of the past” that allows Haitians to engage with the depths of their cultural 
history.6 Additionally, as Hirsch points out, this transmission allows these generations of 
postmemory to raise questions of responsibility, memorialization, and erasure.7 Amidst a 
flurry of work focusing on restoring the image of Dessalines, shifting the perception of 
him from an imperial despot to a politically savvy premier.8  
In what follows, I argue that L’Empereur Dessalines provides us with one of the 
first reevaluations of the representations of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in Haitian history. As 
the Founder of the Théâtre National d’Haïti, the theatre was the ideal location for Coicou 
to perform such a task. However, because only the first act of Coicou’s play was ever 
printed, I insist that by drawing our attention to his poems about the events at Pont Rouge 
we are able to reconstruct an idea of what the final act of L’Empereur Dessalines may 
38 
have looked like. Finally, in the wake of feminist interventions into Haitian history and 
literary studies, I examine the implications of Coicou’s claim that Défilée – a solider 
under Dessalines’s during the Haitian Revolution – is the “perfect incarnation of [a 
Haitian] national consciousness.]”9 
Troping the Bard: Massillon Coicou’s “ambition poétique” 
Apart from notable exceptions, Massillon Coicou’s œuvre has been severely 
understudied, and when it has, it has been subjected to rather capricious readings.10 
Perhaps one of the most notable, and contradictory, attempts to engage with Coicou’s 
literary production comes from the Haitian bibliophile, historian, and archivist his 
monumental survey of Haitian literature, Les Origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne 
(1962). In analyzing Coicou’s poetry, Trouillot frequently compares the Haitian bard’s 
early works with his more “mature” later works producing a rather subjective evaluation 
of the young poet’s “art.” Preferring the patriotic style of Coicou’s Poésies nationales 
(1892) Trouillot argues that his two subsequent volumes of poetry Impressions and 
Passions (1903) are that of an immature, romantic poet, “[Ce] sont des œuvres de 
première jeunesse ; quant aux Poésies [nationales], elles dénotent plus de maturité, cette 
maturité à laquelle aboutira le barde dans L’Oracle ou dans L’Empereur Dessalines […] 
[These are works of a young poet, when it comes to Poésies [nationales], they denote the 
utmost maturity, this maturity that the bard would fully achieve in L’Oracle or in 
L’Empereur Dessalines…]”11 However, that five years after publishing Les Origines 
sociales Trouillot changes his tone in reference to Coicou’s later works, especially 
L’Empereur Dessalines, in the preface to his own play representing the assassination of 
39 
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Dessalines, ou le sang du Pont Rouge (1967). In the opening 
paragraph of the Trouillot’s preface, he states:  
Ce ne sera pas la première fois que l’Empereur Dessalines aura été placé sur la 
scène. Massillon Coicou, dans son « Dessalines », nous a présenté au début de ce 
siècle, un personnage falot et ridicule, qui ne reflète pas la tendance nationaliste 
ordinaire du barde, de l’auteur de « L’Oracle » et des « Poésies Nationales ». 
 
[This is not the first time that Emperor Dessalines will have been staged. 
Massillon Coicou, in his “Dessalines,” presented us, at the beginning of the 
century, a bland and ridiculous character, which did not reflect the normally 
nationalistic tendency of the bard, the author of “L’Oracle” and “Poésies 
Nationales.”]12 
 
The contradiction of his critique in Les Origines sociales aside, Trouillot, in justifying the 
relevance of his own work, argues that Coicou’s Dessalines reproduces a “fausse 
interprétation de la psychologie des personnages [false interpretation of the characters’ 
psychology]” and claims that the playwright “ne comprenait pas les contingences 
auxquelles l’Empereur était en proie, et que ses réformes, dont quelques-unes étaient les 
plus progressistes de son époque, lui valurent la haine d’une élite dénuée de toute 
aspiration nationale [did not understand the circumstances of which Dessalines was the 
prey, and that his reforms, of which certain ones were the most progressive of his time, 
granted him the hatred of an elite devoid of any nationalist aspirations.]”13 As previously 
mentioned in reference to Coicou’s speech at the Mairie de Paris, this type of hasty 
reading of L’Empereur Dessalines poses problems for an accurate evaluation of the 
poetic and historical work that the Haitian writer gestures towards in recreating the scene 
of Dessalines’s assassination.  
 In the preface to L’Empereur Dessalines, Massillon Coicou interestingly 
anticipates the critique that Trouillot levies against him in the preface to Le Sang du Pont 
Rouge. Presenting his work as one of “bonne foi,” Coicou poetically states that the 
40 
historical event, the assassination of Dessalines at Pont Rouge, is the inspiration for his 
play:  
[Le] charme de la vérité a exercé sur moi sa souveraine puissance, et 
l’imagination du poète s’est fiancée à la raison de l’historien, heureuse de trouver 
dans la seule matière de l’évènement qui l’avait sollicité l’élément de poésie à son 
œuvre. A mesure donc que se déroulaient, à son évocation, les péripéties du 
sombre drame du 17 Octobre [sic], le poète se surprenait à être satisfait de son 
œuvre, qui, pourtant, était l’œuvre d’un peintre fidèle.  
 
[Truth’s charm took control of me with her extreme power, and the poet’s 
imagination wedded itself to the historian’s reason, gleeful to find only in the 
events the material that which had called on the poetic elements of this œuvre. 
Therefore, the somber drama evoked in the events of October 17 unraveled, the 
poet took great pleasure in his work that was, actually, the masterpiece of a 
faithful painter.]14 
 
Rather than a work of historical fiction, where the historical events are seen as potentially 
malleable or unstable, Coicou confesses his desire for a realist exposition of the “somber 
drama of the 17 of October” when Dessalines was betrayed. Furthermore, Coicou’s 
evocation of painting, poetry, and history challenges Trouillot’s limited definition of the 
intellectual work of historians and playwrights. For Coicou, the confluence of the poet’s 
imagination and the historian’s reason provides the ideal perspective from which to 
“mettre l’histoire de notre pays sous nous yeux [place the history of our country before 
our eyes].”15 While recognizing that historians and poets have different tools, their 
agendas can be harmonized in the sense that both seek to reveal the symbolism and 
importance of the national consciousness of a people. As such, Coicou refers to his play 
in the préface as a poem, one that seeks to delve into the meaning of the assassination of 
Dessalines by recreating the events that left an “enormous, bloody mark” on the Haitian 
national consciousness that remains a century later when L’Empereur Dessalines was 
first performed.  
41 
 Even though Coicou shows his concern for the stylistic elements of his play, 
referring occasionally to his writing as poetry and verse, he is more interested in 
revealing the social impact of Dessalines’s assassination. This is, of course, extremely 
ironic when considering Trouillot’s criticism. According to Coicou, two of the most 
pronounced characteristics of Haitian nationalism – servile ignorance and glutinous 
égoïsme – have caused the events that took place at Pont Rouge to become lost in 
posterity. Out of this loss, as a poet-historian, Coicou seeks to recover the betrayal that 
took place on October 17, 1806, in order to reinvigorate the Haitian national 
consciousness. In doing so, Coicou incarnates a “prophetic vision of the past” that 
Édouard Glissant refers to in his preface to the 1961 version of Monsieur Toussaint. 
Discussing the historical studies of CLR James and Aimé Césaire of Toussaint 
Louverture, Glissant claims that his present work: 
[…] n’est pourtant pas tout droit d’inspiration politique ; il se réfère plutôt à ce 
que j’appellerai, par paradoxe, une vision prophétique du passé. Pour ceux qui ne 
connaissent de leur histoire que la part de nuit ou démission à quoi on a voulu les 
réduire, l’élucidation du passé proche ou lointain est une nécessité. Renouer avec 
son histoire obscurcie ou oblitérée, l‘éprouver dans son épaisseur, c’est se vouer 
mieux encore aux saveurs du présent ; lesquelles, dépouillées de cet enracinement 
dans le temps, ramènent à une vaine délectation. C’est là une ambition poétique.  
 
[…is not politically inspired; rather it is linked to what I would call, 
paradoxically, a prophetic vision of the past. For those whose history has been 
reduced by others to darkness and despair, the recovery of the near or distant past 
is imperative. To renew acquaintance with one’s history, obscured or obliterated 
by others, is to relish fully the present, for the experience of the present, stripped 
of its roots in time, yields only hollow delights. This is a poetic endeavor.]16 
 
Although Glissant attempts to depoliticize the act of recovering history by stating that his 
project is not politically, but rather poetically inspired. This does not, however, make 
Glissant’s play apolitical. Instead, he intentionally melds poetics and politics in his 
historically informed play. In his recent study The Haitian Revolution in the Literary 
42 
Imaginary: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints, Philip Kaisary argues that 
Glissant’s distancing of himself from political recoveries of Toussaint Louverture, most 
notably from CLR James’s The Black Jacobins and Aimé Césaire’s Toussaint 
Louverture, “foreshadows Glissant’s later retreat to cultural politics, a position that 
becomes most clearly apparent in the 1990 work Poétique de la Relation.”17 Ostensibly 
arguing that Glissant’s interpretation of Haitian history in a wider, post-national scope 
weakens the political radicalism of Toussaint Louverture – and other historical figures – 
Kaisary suggests that Monsieur Toussaint marks a conservative turn in Glissant’s 
postcolonial poetics. While Kaisary’s evaluation of the sparse criticism of Glissant’s play 
is masterful, I disagree that a fallible “all-too-human” Toussaint constitutes a pessimistic 
political stance.18 Toussaint’s imperfection, rather than being a negative or pessimistic 
politics, allows other heroic figures to enter the fray in a well-established 
historiographical and literary tradition that privileges Louverture. I contend that 
Glissant’s “prophetic vision of the past,” while foregrounded as being a poetic 
positioning, is actually the type of radical political project Massillon Coicou undergoes in 
L’Empereur Dessalines to render Jean-Jacques Dessalines present in the Haitian national 
consciousness. 
Staging Dessalines: A Poetic In(ter)vention 
As Haitian studies continue to develop in the aftermath of the “Haitian Turn,” 
scholars and artists have devoted a great deal of energy to understanding the repressive 
power of representation in historical and literary scholarship. 19 One of the most 
concerted efforts has been to revisit the figure of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Portions of 
edited volumes, sections in peer-reviewed journals, and entire journal volumes – in the 
43 
case of the July 2012 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly – have provided a new 
stage for analysis and re-framing of the legacy Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In his 2005 
article “The Theater of the Haitian Revolution/The Haitian Revolution as Theater,” 
Michael Dash argues that the “bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution has provided an 
occasion for a tragicomic restaging of the events that led to the declaration of Haitian 
independence in 1804.”20 Ten years later, with the recent commemoration of the 
“Memorial for Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade”21 in Guadeloupe, literary scholar 
Deborah Jenson argues that Dessalines’s unique invention of “a dual liberty, both anti-
colonial and anti-slavery” is a reason why the Haitian liberator should continue his path 
towards center stage.22 In her magisterial study Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex 
and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution, Jenson directs our attention to the need to 
understand the way history and literature meld together in constructing the 
representations of leaders like Dessalines. If we are to “understand and appreciate the 
significance of narrative or poetic representations” of Dessalines, as well as the “forces 
that allowed, or repressed [them]” it is crucial to engage with the way theater works with 
and projects (counter)narratives in a popular sphere.23 
 The opening scene of the play is set around a royal ball, held in the honor of 
Dessalines’s daughter Célimène and the offering of her hand in marriage to the future 
president of the Republic of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion.24 It is interesting to note, that 
Célimène does not actually appear in in the play, nor is she included amongst the actors 
listed in the play’s paratext. From the very beginning, the treacherous plot to assassinate 
Dessalines looms over the play, from the gossiping palace guards to generals Henry 
Christophe and Pétion. After humbly declining Célimène’s hand, the action of the play 
44 
alternates between Dessalines addressing his inner circle of advisors and Pétion plotting 
his demise. Henry Christophe is the only character that is a part of both factions, serving 
as a double agent in order to placate Dessalines and aid Pétion in his plot.  
The later scenes of the first act delve into the psychology of Dessalines, who 
appears wounded by his unfaithful cabinet of generals and advisors. Often featuring long 
speeches by the emperor, these moments allow Coicou to confront and dispel claims of 
Dessalinian barbarism. Creating the conspiracy of revolt in the southern provinces of 
Haiti, Christophe and Pétion trick Dessalines into declaring war. The final scene of the 
first act ends with Dessalines “extrêmement courroucé [extremely irate]” departing with a 
faction of troops to quell the uprising.25 Coincidentally, this is the final scene of 
L’Empereur Dessalines because the second and final act of the play was lost or never 
printed. The fragmentation of Coicou’s play, in a metaphorical sense, means that 
Dessalines is never assassinated, which provides the play with a rather radical, albeit 
unintentional, vision of Dessalines. As a result of the loss of the second act, Dessalines’s 
assassination is not the only absence, but the only female character in the play, Défilée, 
never appears on stage. In reading L’Empereur Dessalines, these absences are key 
considerations when understanding the representations of Dessalines, Défilée and Haitian 
history through Coicou’s re-imagining of the events at Pont Rouge.  
 Returning to Dash’s reference to the theater of the Haitian revolution, a major 
portion of the restitution of Jean-Jacques Dessalines takes place in Caribbean literature. 
While Dessalines is a character in quite a few fictional and theatrical works from Haiti, 
the Caribbean, and the African diaspora, these characters are often flat, secondary roles 
that render the revolutionary as a brutish general and second in command to Toussaint 
45 
Louverture. However, as Marie-Agnès Sourieau points out, there are a number of plays in 
which Dessalines is the protagonist such as Dessalines ou le sang du Pont Rouge by 
Hénock Trouillot, Le Pont Rouge by Jean Métellus, and Dessalines, ou la passion de 
l’indépendence by Vincent Placoly. These plays all feature “a shared historic vision – a 
Dessalinian imaginary.”26 All three of the plays Sourieau analyzes are set around the 
assassination of Dessalines in 1806, but Coicou’s L’Empereur Dessalines interestingly 
falls out of the purview of her work. Throughout the course of her article, Sourieau 
formulates three separate, yet linked, readings of the theatrical Dessalines: the paternal, 
the Christ-like, and the tyrant. While the first two readings are compatible with Coicou’s 
L’Empereur Dessalines, the “tyrannical” side of Dessalines is much more nuanced 
because of the way Massillon Coicou interprets the impending assassination plot at Pont 
Rouge. 
For Massillon Coicou, Dessalines’s assassination is not just an act of treachery, of 
fratricide, but also an instance of historical brutality that alters the lived experience of 
Haitians. For this reason, Coicou casts Dessalines as a victim of tyranny, rather than an 
unprovoked practitioner. From the very beginning, Dessalines is viewed as a peaceful, 
unifying presence, especially by the palace guards in the first scene of the play: 
Factionnaire 1:Vous avez vu?  
Factionnaire 2: J’ai vu 
Factionnaire 1: L’empereur danse! 
Factionnaire 2: Il danse. 
Factionnaire 1: Décidément, c’est donc doux d’avoir l’indépendance! Nous ne 
connaissons [sic] pas tout cela sous les blancs. N’est-ce pas? 
Factionnaire 2: Ah, ça, non! 
[…] 
Factionnaire 1: […] L’Empereur est un homme, un nègre comme nous; et tous 
ceux que l’on nomme le Grand Conseil, tous ceux que nous voyons ici et qui 
dansent, ce sont des nègres, eux aussi! N’est-ce pas que c’est bien? 
 
46 
[Guard 1: Have you seen?  
Guard 2: I have seen 
Guard 1: The Emperor dances! 
Guard 2: He dances. 
Guard 1: Assuredly, it is quite splendid to be free. We didn’t have that with the 
whites, right?  
 Guard 2: Oh, that, no! 
[…] 
Guard 1: The Emperor is a man, a negro like us, and all those of who refer to him 
as the Grand Consul, all of those who we see here and who dance are negroes as 
well! Isn’t it wonderful?]27 
 
Before presenting the assassination plot, Coicou carefully notes the systemic changes that 
have taken place in Haiti under Dessalines’ reign. In spite of their subordinate position as 
palace guards, the ubiquity of black freedom has changed the way they look at the world. 
Black bodies are no longer chained slaves or brutal soldiers, but prestigious political 
figures free to dance. It is also important to know that the palace guards are the only 
characters in the play who are unnamed, anonymous Haitians, representing the view of 
“the people.” After introducing Pétion, Gérin and Christophe as the principal figures in 
the assassination plot, Dessalines enters onto the stage as a jovial presence:  
Amis et compagnons, même avant de m’asseoir 
Ce qu’à chacun de vous j’ai dit cent fois ce soir,  
Pardonnez-moi de vous le redire sans cesse:  
C’est que je suis content du bal de la princesse,  
Qui fait que vous voici groupés autour de moi  
Comme au premier janvier. Aussi, c’est dans l’émoi 
De ces doux souvenirs qui bercent ma mémoire… 
 
[Friends and companions, even before being seated 
What I have told each and every one of you this evening, 
Pardon me for having ceaselessly told you again: 
That I am happy with the princess’s ball,  
Which means that you are all gathered here around me 
Like on January first. Also, it’s the emotion 
Of these delicate moments that nurture my memory… 28 
 
47 
Coicou’s Dessalines is a charismatic “man of the people,” giving thanks to his guests and 
sharing his fond memories of a young nation on the night he plans to offer Pétion his 
daughter Célimène’s hand in marriage as a symbol of unity between the mulatto and 
black Haitians. Later in the scene Pétion, in spite of his perfidious character, mentions, 
“we are your children and you [Dessalines] are our father.” Pétion’s character allows 
Coicou to create a nearly canonical tragedy out of The Pont Rouge.  
 As a further rejection of the traditional presentation of Dessalines, Coicou’s 
Emperor rejects his tyrannical destiny: “Moi qui veux cependant, à défaut d’être un 
grand/ entre tous, n’être pas, pour le moins, un tyran [I who want, however, by default of 
being grand above all, not to be, at least, a tyrant.]”29 After having learned of Pétion’s 
seditious plans, Dessalines pledges to no longer be the father, nor the leader of Haiti, but 
its master. As Sourieau rightfully points out, this was the historical reality that led 
Dessalines to “[exercise] power in a ruthless and despotic way that replicated the colonial 
pattern of domination and slavery.”30 However, in Coicou’s version, Henry Christophe 
talks Dessalines off of this tyrannical ledge by committing himself to the greater project 
of justice, forcing Pétion and Gérin to confess to their treacherous plot or “c’est moi qui, 
de ma main, les frapperai tous deux [It is I who, with my own hands, will strike both of 
them.]”31 Dessalines ultimately accepts Christophe’s “wise” proposal because, without 
Christophe taking responsibility for punishing Pétion and Gérin, the Haitian elite would 
blame him for their deaths. In Coicou’s formulation of the events that took place at Pont 
Rouge, Dessalines the Christ-like figure and Christophe is the proverbial Judas Iscariot. 
Before leaving Christophe, Dessalines laments: “Ils diront que je suis un brutal,/ N’est-ce 
pas? Un tryan, le plus cruel des maîtres?/ Mais eux, dis! Que sont-ils? Ne sont-ils pas des 
48 
traîtres? / Pourtant garde-toi bien du plus léger soupçon / Qui leur ferait saisir que je sais 
qu’ils sont! [They’ll say I’m a brute, no? A tyrant, the most cruelest of masters? But what 
of them! What are they? Are they not traitors? Maintain, yet, the slightest suspicion 
which will make them realize that I know that they are!]”32 Dessalines leaves the stage 
just as troubled as when he entered, however, he is still not aware that Christophe is the 
missing link in the planned coup d’état.  
 Conscious of his position as emperor, Coicou’s Dessalines never ceases to 
interrogate his potential fall into despotism. After deciding that the southern Haitian elites 
are to blame for a planned uprising, Dessalines declares civil war in order to maintain the 
social fabric of the young Caribbean nation: 
Le Sud souffle la guerre, il n’y aura que du sang!  
 Car moi, je ne vais pas distinguer l’innocent 
Du coupable. Le Sud est debout ; il succombe, 
C’est le Sud que mes mains coucheront dans la tombe ! 
On a dit qu’autrefois je me montrerai cruel,  
C’est faux ! Mais cette fois je jure d’être tel ! 
[…] Moi, pour fonder mon règne, 
Sans vouloir cependant que jamais nul me craigne,  
Mais en disant plutôt que mon peuple naissant 
Est la chair de ma chair et le sang de mon sang ! 
 
[The South declares war, there will be only blood ! 
I shall not pause to distinguish innocence 
From culpability. The South is on its feet, it shall fall, 
It is the South that my hands will send to its tomb! 
They’ve said before that I would prove cruel,  
This is a lie! But this time, I certainly will be! 
[…] To establish my reign, 
Without wanting for anyone to ever fear me, 
But rather saying, I wish for my people to flourish,  
For they are the flesh of my flesh and the blood of my blood!]33 
 
Coicou’s Dessalines cognizant of his detractors’ views often exercises a rather 
authoritarian use of power, confessing his reluctance to become a despot. If Dessalines is 
49 
a tyrant, it is not of his doing, but that of his enemies. As the last lines of his declaration 
of war highlight, Dessalines’s ultimate wish is to unite the Haitian people, of his own 
flesh and blood, rather than to make them fear his wrath. Another example of how 
Dessalines is a measured character is when Gédéon reveals that Christophe is amongst 
the treacherous bunch. Rather than reacting violently to the news, Dessalines wishes to 
know why his military entourage is conspiring against him. In fact, it takes Boisrond-
Tonnerre and others to convince Dessalines that it is better not to question treachery, but 
“to attack it at its roots.”34 
 The truth is that we may never know how L’Empereur Dessalines ends because 
the second and final act was never printed the only known version printed by the 
Imprimerie Edmond Chenet. However, through an interpretation of Dessalines’s final 
lines of the first act as well as excerpts from Coicou’s poem “Une Voix sur le Pont-
Rouge” we can infer that the second act seeks to reprise the figure of Dessalines as a 
martyr for the unification of Haiti rather than a despotic ruler. In his final words before 
embarking towards his assassination at Pont Rouge, Dessalines proclaims to a group of 
sword-brandishing soldiers:  
 Alors, l’œuvre étant fait [sic], et bien fait, s’il s’élance  
 Un jour de ces débris, par dessus leur silence  
De tombe, un autre Sud, un autre peuple, enfin, 
Mon souvenir pour lui n’aura pas été vain ; 
Car c’est sur l’ordre, alors, qu’il faudra qu’il se fonde, 
Pour qu’il se fasse, un jour, sa place dans le monde ! 
 
[This task is well achieved, very well so, if it leaps out 
One day from the pile of debris, their silence will rise 
From the tomb, a new South, a new people, finally, 
My memory of her will not have been in vain;  
Because it is order on which the South will have to establish itself, 
In order for it to make, one day, a place for itself in the world!]35 
 
50 
For Dessalines, the war in the South is more than just a manner to retain his power; it is 
an act of nation building. These lines have significance beyond the scope of Dessalines’s 
assassination. They also take root in the Haitian struggle for independence, which sought 
to create a nation of former slaves looking for their place in the world. Coicou echoes the 
significance of these final words in his poem dedicated to Dessalines in the collection 
Poésies nationales entitled “Une voix sur le Pont-Rouge: 
Et tu crus, ô Garat, t’acquérir de la gloire, 
Quand tu frappas ainsi le héros immortel ! 
Et tu crus effacer une ombre sous le ciel,  
Quand tu jetas ainsi le voile sur l’histoire ! 
 
Non, il grandit toujours, l’homme de Dieu hanté, 
Le bras fort qui ceignit la race en agonie 
Du bouclier d’airain que forgea son génie ;  
Non, il vit, le géant né de la Liberté. 
 
Dans la région sainte où la Force s’incline,  
Tremblante au pied du Droit ; par delà le ciel bleu, 
Au rang des rédempteurs, satellites du Dieu 
De justice et d’amour, rayonne Dessaline [sic]. 
 
[And you believed, O Garat, to have attained glory,  
When you struck this immortal hero! 
And you believed to have erased the shadow below the heavens, 
When you so throw the veil over history! 
 
No, he grows still, the haunted man of God, 
The powerful arm that protected this race in agony 
From the bronze buckle that forged his genius; 
No, he lives, the giant borne of Freedom. 
 
In the saintly region where Strength succumbs,  
Trembling at the feet of the Law; to beyond the blue heavens, 
Beside the redeemers, the disciples of God 
Of justice and love, shines Dessalines.] 36 
 
In both of these excerpts, Coicou establishes Dessalines as the founder of Haiti, but also 
as a symbol for Haiti itself. Both the country and its emperor were born of a struggle for 
51 
freedom, maintained by racial unity, and betrayed by the slander of tyranny. Although the 
second act is lost, Coicou’s poetry allows us to speculate that the missing act seeks to 
valorize Dessalines and vilify his perfidious entourage. Through both the play and his 
poetry, Coicou reveals a dedication to the past that exemplifies the Glissantian mission to 
plunge into the past in order to understand the present.  
What if Haiti Were a Woman: Reading Défilée and Her Absence37 
In his 1853 study Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti, Beaubrun Ardouin provides a 
dramatic account of the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. While on his way to 
quell insurrection in the south of Haiti, Dessalines and his troops were ambushed, fired 
upon, and killed by conspiring soldiers led by Henry Christophe and Alexandre Pétion. In 
Ardouin’s retelling of this formidable moment in Haitian history he focuses on the body 
of Dessalines, how it was stripped naked, mutilated, disfigured, and left on the side of the 
road to rot.38 Not long after, a general ordered Dessalines’s body to be relocated to the 
Place d’Armes in front of the royal palace on Port-au-Prince, representing the emperor’s 
ultimate fall from grace. In this sanguinary moment of Haitian history, one woman, 
Défilée Bazile, dared to resist the summary execution and humiliation of Dessalines by 
gathering and interring the Emperor’s remains. For this, among other reasons, Défilée 
was long presumed mad.39 In his preface to L’Empereur Dessalines, Coicou argues that 
Défilée is the ultimate symbol of Haitian national consciousness, however, she never 
appears because the second act is missing. By reading historical accounts of Défilée’s 
devotion to the humanity of Dessalines’s dead body, Coicou’s play constitutes a feminist 
intervention into the representation of Haitian history through a poetic mission to include 
Défilée as a key figure in the recovery of Dessalines’s assassination at the Pont-Rouge.40 
52 
The older brother of the Haitian poet Coriolan Ardouin, Beaubrun Ardouin is one 
of many Haitian historians to preserve Défilée’s legacy in historical interpretations of 
Dessalines’s assassination. In Etudes sur l’histoire d’Haïti, Ardouin writes: 
Ce corps inanimé, mutilé, percé de tant de coups, à la tête surtout, était à peine 
reconnaissable ; il resta exposé sur cette place d’armes jusque dans l’après-midi, 
où une femme noire, nommée Défilé [sic], qui était folle depuis longtemps, 
rendue à un moment lucide, ou plutôt mue par un sentiment de compassion, 
gémissait seule auprès des restes du Fondateur de l’Indépendance, lorsque des 
militaires, envoyés par ordre du général Pétion, vinrent les enlever et les porter au 
cimetière, jetant des fleurs sur cette fosse qui recouvrait les restes de Dessalines. 
Quelques années ensuite, Madame Inginac y fit élever une modeste tombe sur 
laquelle on lit cette épitaphe : « Ci-gît Dessalines, mort à 48 ans ».   
 
[This inanimate body, mutilated, pierced by so many blows to the head, was 
barely recognizable. It remained exposed at the place d’armes until the afternoon 
when a black woman, named Défilée – long considered mad – benefitted from a 
lucid moment or, rather, was moved by sentiments of compassion, moaned alone 
before the remains of the Founder of Independence and, after the soldiers had 
come, by order of General Pétion, to remove them and carry them to the 
cemetery, spread flowers over the pit that held the scraps of Dessalines. A few 
years later, Madame Inginac erected a modest headstone on which featured the 
following inscription: “Here lies Dessalines, dead at the age of 48.”]41 
 
For Ardouin, this moment is symbolic of a Haitian patriotism and sentimentality towards 
Dessalines as the founder of Haitian Independence. In spite of his recognition for Défilée, 
it is impossible to note the inherent judgment Ardouin levies against her as a mad black 
woman. How is it that a woman, long presumed mad, would have a moment of clarity 
that would convince her to preserve and respect the humanity of Dessalines inanimate 
cadaver? Myriam J.A. Chancy articulates in her study Framing Silence: Revolutionary 
Novels by Haitian Women, how women like Défilée “have consistently been written out 
of both the historical an literary records of Haiti” because, as Chancy notes, “Haitian 
women have been subsumed under an overtly male-identified national identity.”42 
Juxtaposed with J.C. Dorsainvil’s narrative of Dessalines burial in Manuel d’histoire 
53 
d’Haïti (1925) we can see how Défilée and Madame Inginac are characterized 
differently, this time as the principal actors of Haitian national recognition of Dessalines 
as the Fondateur de l’Indépendance:  
Sur le soir, une vieille folle, nommé [sic] Défilée, enferma dans un sac les restes 
de l’Empereur et les transporta au cimetière intérieur. Plus tard, quand les 
passions politiques furent apaisées, Mme Inginac reconnut publiquement que 
Dessalines avait été bon pour elle et son mari ; elle fit ériger, à Sainte-Anne, une 
modeste pierre tombale avec un épitaphe, éloquente en sa simplicité : « Ci-gît 
Dessalines, mort à 48 ans ». 
 
[In the evening, an elderly madwoman named Défilée, gathered the remains of the 
Emperor in a satchel and carried them to the interior cemetery. Later, when the 
political passions of the day subsided, Madame Inginac publically recognized that 
Dessalines had been good to her and her husband. Therefore, at Saint-Anne, she 
erected a modest headstone with the inscription, elegant in its simplicity: “Here 
lies Dessalines, dead at the age of 48.”] 43 
 
While Ardouin and Dorsainvil both mention Madame Inginac as well as Défilée in their 
descriptions, the difference between the two is subtle but reveals the foregrounding of 
Défilée, rather than the state as the principle actor in commemorating Dessalines. 
However, neither author seeks to delve into the subject of Défilée’s purported madness, 
nor do they wish to inscribe her as part of a larger history of the Haitian Revolution. This 
is part of a wider trend that Chancy refers to as the “tactile absence” of women in 
“historical reconstructions of the Haitian Revolution (1786-1804) and of all the major 
periods of colonialism that took place following Independence.”44  
 While Défilée’s presence in the historical record ensures that she will not be 
forgotten, her characterization as mad has, especially in theater, a lasting legacy. In 
Langston Hughes’s play The Emperor of Haiti, Défilée, like many of the other characters 
in the play, have had their names changed de-historicizing the actors in the play, while 
maintaining a relatively accurate account of Dessalines’s assassination.45 Hughes’s 
54 
changing of Défilée’s name disrupts the historical preservation of Défilée’s resistance to 
Dessalines’s body being publicly humiliated, whereas other Haitian playwrights who 
have written about the assassination of Dessalines have categorically defined Défilée’s 
character, like Hénock Trouillot, as “une folle” [a crazy woman].46 To return to Marie-
Agnès Sourieau’s influential article on Dessalines in historical drama, she argues that 
Défilée resembles Mary Magdalene, “mourning and caring for the body of a now 
sanctified man.”47 In comparing the role of Défilée in Trouillot’s Dessalines ou le sang 
du Pont Rouge, Vincent Placoly’s Dessalines ou la passion de l’indépendance, and Jean 
Métellus’s Le Pont Rouge,48 Sourieau ultimately echoes Chancy’s evaluation of women 
in the Haitian national consciousness, writing: 
Défilée personifies the courage and patriotic piety of the young country, but her 
madness dooms her to uttering nonsense and finally to silence. Thus, if this 
madwoman embodies the national consciousness of Haitians, as many historians 
and dramatists seem to believe, what can we say about the nation’s reason and 
wisdom over the two centuries that will follow?49 
 
Sourieau rightfully emphasizes the need to question the intent of the three playwrights. 
What kind of future do these plays imagine for Haiti if their founder is brutally murdered 
and the only lucid and patriotic figure is a madwoman?50 Furthermore, what does 
Défilée’s madness mean for subsequent generations of Haitian women seeking to find a 
voice in the nation’s storied history?51 
 The effacement of the second act in Coicou’s L’Empereur Dessalines is 
nonetheless problematic when trying to locate Défilée’s voice, if not simply because she 
never appears in the first act. However, we can see in the preface that while Coicou 
accepts the assumption that Défilée was a madwoman, without profound reflection on the 
colonial or patriarchal trauma that might be at the origins of her mental instability, he 
55 
questions the sanity of Haitian men as well. Emphasizing Défilée’s act of resistance, 
Coicou writes:  
Et, d’autre part, n’est-il pas vrai que, lorsque Défilé [sic] traversait Port-au-Prince, 
faisant d’un sac fangeux un linceul à l’empereur, bravant les huées d’une cohue 
de gavroches lapidant ce cadavre en lambeaux, subissant enfin la risée de tant 
d’hommes et de femmes qui trouvaient insensé le geste de la folle, n’est-il pas 
vrai que Défilé [sic], qui n’avait certes aucun souci de la gloire de demain, qui ne 
pouvait, en sa sublime inconscience […] n’est-il pas vrai, pourtant, que la plus 
belle incarnation de la conscience nationale c’est elle, cette folle qui s’en allait 
ainsi au milieu de ces fous qui se croyaient des sages ? 
 
[And, for that matter, is it not true that when Defilée crossed Port-au-Prince using 
a muddy sack as a shroud for the emperor, braving harassment by the various 
street urchins who tore this cadaver to shreds, enduring the mockery of many men 
and women who found the madwoman’s gesture senseless. Is it not true that 
Défilée had no fears for the glory of tomorrow, who could have in her sublime 
ignorance […] Is it not true that she is the most beautiful incarnation of a national 
consciousness, this madwoman who ventured out amongst all these madmen who 
thought themselves wise?]52 
 
Not only is the act of recovering Dessalines’s body, battered and torn to shreds, 
considered an act of resistance, but the humiliation and harassment that Défilée 
undergoes in order to preserve the Emperor’s remains is not effaced. Noting the “boos of 
the street urchins” allows us to further interpret the way Coicou inscribes the violence 
Défilée, herself, undergoes as a possible source of her madness. Even though Coicou 
characterizes her as mad, her insanity is called into question in relation to “all of these 
madmen who thought themselves wise.” For if the person who recovers the mutilated 
body of the Emperor is mad, from what mental affliction did those responsible for his 
murder suffer? By questioning Défilée’s effacement via madness, we can imagine that in 
the lost second act that a resistant, potentially vocal Défilée, preserves the Dessalinian 
legacy of liberty and anti-colonialism, in which Haitian women have their own share.  
Finding the New in the Old: Responding to the Call for New Narratives  
56 
 On the 11th of January 2010, Gina Athena Ulysse began writing a series of essays 
and reflections on the way Haiti is represented in art, cinema, Western media and society. 
Her essays would later become her 2015 book Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-
quake Chronicle, wherein she argues that “the Haiti in the public domain was a 
rhetorically and symbolically incarcerated, trapped in singular narratives and clichés that, 
unsurprisingly, hardly moved beyond stereotypes.”53 In her masterful study The Fear of 
French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas, Sara E. 
Johnson suggests that Haiti has always been the object of (neo)colonial power, whether 
being represented historically as the “Pearl of the Antilles” or the “Poorest country in the 
Western Hemisphere.”54 Changing this perception is a monumental task. However, as this 
study of Massillon Coicou’s fragmented and lost play demonstrates, there are “new” 
narratives that can be found in the old. Narratives that have been hidden in the past, lost 
in archives, appearing as apparitions in fragmented literary-historical works.  
 As Ulysse points out, changing the perception of Haiti is a matter of narrative and 
representation. Feminist scholars Myriam JA Chancy and Marie-Agnès Sourieau draw 
attention to the need for increased visibility and questioning of Haitian women’s absence, 
silence, and exclusion from the nation’s history. When taken at face value, Coicou 
provides mere speculation into the role women like Défilée played in the moments 
following Haitian independence. However, when juxtaposed to historical descriptions 
drawn from Haitian history textbooks, female agency is elided to favor a collective or 
state process of memorialization. By recovering and re-reading texts derided by 
generations of biased critics like L’Empereur Dessalines, we can see how women have 
created, acted out, and performed resistance to state violence before and after Haitian 
57 
independence. Furthermore, the study of Haitian theater, in particular, provides us with 
an artistic medium in which women played an active role throughout various moments in 
Haitian history. Theater, thus, provides a stage where new and obscured representations 
of Haiti can be recovered in order to combat the pervasiveness of singular, stereotypical 
perceptions of Haiti and its history.
58 
Chapter 4 
Staging Anti-Colonialism in Fin-de Siècle Haitian Theater: Fort de Joux; ou les 
derniers moments de Toussaint Louverture by Vendenesse Ducasse 
 
“That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing but a 
literary device.” – Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings1 
 
Iconic Toussaint: A Global Figure 
 
Toussaint Louverture’s imprisonment and subsequent death at the Fort de Joux on 
April 7th, 1803 triggered a world-literary event.2 Spanning two centuries, writers such as 
William Wordsworth (Britain), Alphonse de Lamartine and Eugène Labiche (France), 
Anna Seghers (Germany), Jean-Michel Cusset (Guadeloupe), Édouard Glissant 
(Martinique), CLR James (Trinidad), Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia), Langston Hughes and 
Wendell Phillips (USA) have recounted the final moments of Toussaint’s life in literary 
forms from poetry to theater to prose. Among the leaders of the Haitian revolution, 
Toussaint and his many literary and historical representations have received, by far, the 
most critical attention. The subject of various biographies from Haitian, French, and US 
American writers, Toussaint and his “world historical” legacy continue to raise questions 
about the problematic nature of his tenure as the Governor of Saint-Domingue and the 
relationship between Saint-Domingue and France.3 
 More than one-hundred years after slavery was abolished in Haiti, Haitian 
playwright and contributor to the literary revue La Ronde Vendenesse Ducasse wrote and 
enacted his play Toussaint au Fort de Joux (1896). It is one of the first plays published by 
a Haitian dramaturge to dramatically represent Toussaint Louverture’s captivity and 
death in France in 1803.4 The author of many historical plays in both prose and verse, 
Toussaint au Fort de Joux was the only play ever printed due to the efforts of writer and 
59 
actor Antoine Innocent (1873-1960). Innocent reassembled the script and printed the play 
under the title, Fort de Joux; ou les derniers moments de Toussaint Louverture.5 Apart 
from a warm critical reception by his contemporaries, Innocent and Duraciné Vaval, 
literary critics and anthologists have been reluctant to credit Ducasse’s work as being 
much more than a fictionalization of Toussaint’s imprisonment and death. Anthologist 
Ghislain Gouraige, while including Ducasse in his volume Histoire de la littérature 
haïtienne, questions the verisimilitude of Fort de Joux, arguing that Ducasse “had taken 
the liberty to imagine [certain] circumstances [avait encore droit en imaginer les 
circonstances]”6 As a result, Ducasse’s work fell out of a critical purview until the 
exploratory and provocative work by VèVè A. Clark and Jean Jonaissant shed new light 
on potential tracks for future research into Caribbean and Haitian literary studies.   
However, the scholarship on Haiti and the Haitian Revolution over the last twenty 
years has revealed a particular fascination with Toussaint, especially in a transnational 
scope, eliding Haitian representations of the leader and the final moments of his life in 
captivity.7 Furthermore, when considering the theatrical representations of Toussaint, of 
which many focus specifically on his death in the Fort de Joux, scholars prefer a Pan-
Caribbean approach rather than examining Haitian historical drama. For this reason, this 
chapter analyzes the various ways in which Vendenesse Ducasse memorializes Toussaint 
in Fort de Joux, ou les derniers moments de Toussaint Louverture as a champion for 
freedom. In the Haitian national memory, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Papa Desalin, is 
often referred to as the key founding father of Haiti, while Toussaint occupies a 
secondary role. Why then, does Ducasse choose to reincarnate this episode from Haiti’s 
colonial past? In assessing the theatrical reenactment of Toussaint’s imprisonment and 
60 
death, I argue that Ducasse’s representation of Toussaint’s final moments reveals the 
brutality of French colonial nostalgia as Saint-Domingue begins to shift to independent 
Haiti. By doing so, Ducasse deviates from the majority of the dramatic representations of 
Toussaint, portraying him as unequivocally anticolonial, despite Toussaint’s claims to 
French loyalty in his legislative writings as the Governor of Saint-Domingue. 
 
Escaping from the Fort de Joux/Frenchness  
 
 Following Henry Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s surrender to General 
Leclerc, Toussaint Louverture was abducted and deported from Saint-Domingue to 
France on June 7th, 1802.8 In a letter to Napoléon Bonaparte, General Leclerc briefly 
recounts the affaire: “j’envoie en France avec toute sa famille cet homme si 
profondément perfide, qui, avec tant hypocrisie, nous a fait tant de mal. Le gouvernement 
verra ce qu’il doit en faire [I’m sending to France, with his family, a man so deeply 
perfidious, who, with so much hypocrisy, did us a great deal of harm. The government 
will see what needs to be done with him.]”9 Toussaint arrived in France in July and was 
later transferred to the Fort de Joux on August 23rd, where General Caffarelli would later 
interrogate the revolutionary and current Governor-for-life of Saint-Domingue. Although 
Leclerc’s letter is rather ambiguous in terms of not only the charges against Toussaint, 
but also what awaited him at the fortress on the France/Swiss border. John Patrick Walsh 
rightfully points to the both the cruelty of Toussaint’s imprisonment as well as his 
protracted execution in citing a letter found stitched in the handkerchief Toussaint wore 
around his head in captivity. I quote the same passage at length in order to understand the 
conditions that Vendenesse Ducasse depicts in his theatrical rendering of the final 
moments of Toussaint’s life:  
61 
A re te arbitrerement sans montandre ni me dire pour quoi, an pa re toute 
mésavaire, piÿer toute ma famille, an general, saisire mé pa pié, et les garde, man 
bar qué, an voyer nu comme ver de ter, re pan dre de colomni les plusatros cer 
mon conte, da pré cé la, je sui an voyer dant les fon du ca chau, nes ce pa coupe la 
janbre dun quie quin et loui dire marché, nes ce pa coupé la langue et loui dire 
parlé, nes ce pa an teré un homme vivant? 
 
[To arrest arbitrarily without hearing me, nor telling me why, taking away all my 
affairs, pillaging my entire family, in general, seizing my papers and keeping 
them, embarking me, sending me naked like an earthworm, spreading the most 
atrocious calumny about me, after that, I am sent to the depths of a cell, is this not 
to cut off the leg of someone and telling him to walk, is this not to cut out the 
tongue and telling him to speak, is this not to bury a man alive?]10 
 
Toussaint vividly describes how his kidnapping and imprisonment has left him physically 
and psychologically debilitated, providing a vivid depiction of the conditions in the Fort 
de Joux. This is the point de départ for Ducasse’s play as Toussaint’s personal valet, 
Mars Plaisir, trembling from the cold, says “Oh! Ce froid du Jura, cette prison de glace! 
[Oh! The cold of the Juras, this prison of ice!]”11 
 Over the course of six scenes in verse, one act in total, Ducasse recreates the final 
moments of Toussaint’s life in the Jura Mountains, surrounded by three interlocutors: 
Mars Plaisir, Amyot (the commander of the Fort de Joux), and General Caffarelli 
(Napoleon Bonaparte’s Aide-de-camp). The first scene presents an intimate moment 
between Mars and Toussaint as they share fond memories of Saint-Domingue, nostalgia 
for the victories of the Haitian Revolution, and grief regarding their kidnapping and 
imprisonment in France. One of the more sentimental moments of the play is when 
Toussaint reproaches Mars for having mentioned his two sons and his wife, all of whom 
were abducted by Napoleon in order to leverage Toussaint during his interrogations by 
Caffarelli. Toussaint cuts Mars off, “Tais-toi, car dans mon œil humide, / Je sens venir 
des pleurs. Ne me rappelle pas / Ces êtres adorés, arrachés à mes bras [Be quiet, because 
62 
in my humid eye, / I feel the tears coming. Do not remind me/ of these dear beings taken 
from my very arms.]”12 In scene two, Amyot is sent by Napoleon, who never appears in 
the play but is extensively referenced, to strip Toussaint of his soldier’s regalia and to 
clothe him in “un habit bourgeois [bourgeois cloths]”.13 Toussaint ultimately surrenders 
his epaulettes but refuses to dress as a French bourgeois, reinforcing the idea that he is a 
“man of the people.” I will return to this episode when I discuss Toussaint and Ducasse’s 
apparent “disavowal” of Toussaint’s effusive French loyalty in the 1801 constitution of 
Saint-Domingue.14 Scene three is the shortest, but symbolic in the sense that Toussaint 
gives Mars a collection of writings that he has produced since his captivity began in 
August of 1802.15 General Caffarelli enters the stage in scene four and, employing a 
French republican discourse, begins to interrogate Toussaint in regards to his foreign 
affairs with British General Thomas Maitland and representatives from the Spanish side 
of Saint-Domingue, in what is now the Dominican Republic.16 In spite of Caffarelli’s 
republican speech, constantly referring to Toussaint as “citoyen [citizen],” Napoleon’s 
Aide-de-camp seems to circumscribe a French republic from which Toussaint and Saint-
Dominguans are excluded. This is the basis for what I will discuss later in reference to 
French colonial nostalgia. The fifth scene is where Toussaint implores Mars to leave the 
Fort de Joux, after he receives word from Amyot that he is being transferred to a different 
prison.17 Left alone at the end of scene five, the sixth and final scene begins with 
Caffarelli discovering Toussaint in a delirious state, having forgotten that he was even in 
captivity. Caffarelli ultimately confesses to Toussaint how miserable he feels for his role 
in the entire affair. The play ends with Toussaint predicting the end of the Haitian 
Revolution, dealing colonial slavery the final coup de grâce, and evoking a Dessalinian 
63 
rhetoric by exclaiming “A bas les égorgeurs, VIVE L’INDÉPENDANCE ! [Down with 
the cut-throats, LONG LIVE INDEPENDENCE!]”18 
Confronting French Colonialism with Saint-Dominguan Freedom  
 Returning to the beginning of the play, the discussions between Mars and 
Toussaint set the stage for the ensuing action of the play where both Amyot and 
Caffarelli acknowledge that the French wish to deny these Saint-Dominguans their 
liberty. The interplay between the characters reveal the play’s ultimate battle as being 
between French colonialism and Saint-Dominguan/Haitian freedom, in which Toussaint 
is the lynchpin. On August 17, 1801 Toussaint Louverture promulgated a new 
constitution for the colony of Saint-Domingue declaring in the third article, “Il ne peut 
exister d’esclave sur ce territoire; la servitude y est à jamais abolie. Tous les hommes y 
naissent, vivent et meurent libres et français [Slaves can no longer exist in this land; 
servitude is forever abolished. Everyone here is born, lives, and dies free and French.]”19 
While my goal is not to produce an analysis of Toussaint’s constitution, the context of 
this particular document plays a significant and interesting role in Fort de Joux, ou les 
derniers moments de Toussaint Louverture.20 In her article “Complexities of Imagining 
Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801-1807,” historian Julia Gaffield suggests 
that there are three reasons Toussaint would assign every person born in Saint-Domingue 
French nationality: “to express and engender a sense of loyalty to the metropole,” “to 
gain favor from France and to encourage recognition of Saint-Domingue’s effort to gain 
limited independence,” and “to maintain peace with France.”21  
While these might have been the motives of a historical Toussaint, Ducasse 
includes the clause about freedom in his play, applauding Toussaint’s anticolonial gesture 
64 
but, at the same time, actively disavowing the notion that all Saint-Dominguans be 
legally considered French. We can see this most clearly in three instances: when Mars 
and Toussaint refer to Saint-Domingue in the first scene, when Toussaint refuses to wear 
the French bourgeois uniform, and when Caffarelli excludes Saint-Domingue from his 
vision of the French Republic.  
As prisoners, the valet/master relationship between Mars and Toussaint breaks 
down, even though Mars still considers Toussaint as maître, because they are both 
reduced to inmates. Mars speaks with franchise and Toussaint is aware of his 
imprisonment while they deliberate the freezing temperatures in their French cell. Urging 
Mars to leave him alone in the Fort de Joux, Toussaint confesses his appreciation towards 
his valet:  
Tes souffrances pour moi me navrent, je l’avoue.  
Pour qu’à mon sort, ainsi ton âme se dévoue,  
Tu ne regrettes pas le ciel de ton pays, 
Ce ciel étincelant aux regards, éblouis,  
Et cette immensité scintillante, étoilée, 
Qui sourit et s’étend toujours immaculée ?  
Tu ne regrettes pas l’ombre de tes manguiers,  
La svelte majesté de tes palmiers altiers, 
Ton printemps éternel et tes sources plaintives, 
Les ébats du village et ses chansons naïves, 
Tes vallons, tes forêts aux mystères divers,  
Tes près toujours fleuris, ainsi que tes monts verts ? 
[…] 
Oh ! Dis, t’en souviens-tu ? Pars donc, je t’en conjure. 
La liberté, je te la donne, je le jure. 
 
[The pain you endure in my name rends my heart, I must admit. 
When it comes to my destiny, you devote your soul. 
Regret not the sky of your homeland 
That sky shining bright, dazzling to the eye, 
And this sparkling starry immensity, 
That smiles and immaculately extends itself? 
Regret not the shadow of your mango trees, 
The svelte grandeur of your tall palm trees, 
65 
Your eternal spring and your mourning streams, 
The village rhythms and its naïve songs, 
Your valleys, your forests of diverse mysteries, 
Your flowery plains, as well as your green mounts? 
[…] 
Oh! Do you remember it? Leave then, I beg of you. 
Freedom, I now grant it to you, I assure you.]22 
 
In granting Mars his freedom, Toussaint dissolves the power dynamic that existed in 
Saint-Domingue. Toussaint fully here actualizes the emancipatory ethos, ironically, of the 
1801 constitution while imprisoned in France. However, Mars is, paradoxically still not 
wholly free because he remains a prisoner in the Fort de Joux. Philip Kaisary, in his 
illuminating analysis of Toussaint’s 1801 constitution, notes that “even when freedom is 
offered as a reciprocal bargain by a black revolutionary, rather than as a gift from white 
colonialists, it still falls short.”23Apart from offering him his freedom, Toussaint 
challenges Mars to think about “his country.” Through a nostalgic enumeration of images 
from Saint-Domingue, Toussaint transports the two back to the island and away from the 
frozen heights of the Jura Mountains. It is also important that Toussaint uses the 
possessive “ton pays,” as he himself will later formulate as “mon pays,” attributing to 
Mars a sense of ownership and identification with Saint-Domingue rather than France. In 
spite of Toussaint’s warm gesture toward liberty, Mars refuses to leave his side: 
Oh ! que sera pour moi la liberté sans toi ?  
 […] 
 St-Domingue n’est plus qu’une terre qui navre. 
C’est le pays des pleurs et des crimes sans nom !  
Maître, je n’irai pas à St-Domingue Oh ! non. 
Je ne veux plus revoir ces villages, ces plaines,  
Témoins de mes ébats, témoins de mes fredaines,  
Car je me souviendrai… mes larmes couleront,  
Et les amers regrets me courberont le front. 
D’ailleurs, songez-y bien, Isaac et Placide… 
 
[Oh! What would freedom mean to me without you? 
66 
[…] 
Saint-Domingue is nothing more than a land that mourns 
It’s the country of tears and nameless crimes! 
Master, I will not go to Saint-Domingue. Oh! No. 
I do not wish to see those villages again, those plains, 
Witnesses of my rhythms and of my mischief,  
Because I will remember… my tears will flow, 
And the bitter regrets will ruffle my brow. 
Furthermore, think hard, Isaac and Placide…]24 
 
In Mars’s perspective, Saint-Domingue is not the same country without Toussaint. The 
Governor-for-life’s departure from the island represents the ominous return to colonial 
melancholy. This is not because Mars categorically rejects his country, but that without 
Toussaint there to protect the liberty of the people, Saint-Domingue would revert back 
into a colonial state or, a “country of tears and nameless crimes.” To refer back to the 
1801 constitution, we see how Ducasse transposes similar notions of freedom in the play. 
However, there is a notable ambivalence towards Frenchness, given that neither 
Toussaint nor Mars refer to their country being French, and the possible future of a Saint-
Domingue without Toussaint means the return of the inhumane crimes of French 
colonialism.25 Not only is the possibility of the return of French colonialism a possible 
future for the island, but also Mars’ reference to Toussaint’s two sons Isaac and Placide, 
both kidnapped by Napoleon, imbues the action with the reality of colonial brutality. 
Furthermore, it appears as though Ducasse ignores the historical context of the 1801 
constitution in his play because while Mars might not have been subjected to the abuses 
of slavery, the new set of laws did not abolish the plantation labor system. Kaisary notes 
that, “[w]hile [Toussaint’s set of laws] constitutionalized universal emancipation with 
one hand, with the other it instituted repressive labour control, including enforced 
67 
plantation labour and restrictions on mobility, in the name of commerce and economic 
necessity.”26 
 Between the first and second scene, Toussaint undergoes a remarkable change in 
tone, where he adopts a republican etiquette by referring to his French interlocutors as 
“citoyen.” Sufficiently versed in French republican rhetoric, it is certainly not out of 
character for a “historically accurate” Toussaint, but such a formal epithet amplifies the 
difference between Mars and the French characters. Toussaint does not, for instance, 
refer to Mars as “citoyen,” in spite of the fact that he now has rights as a free person. 
Under the guise of republican decorum, Amyot, loyal servant of Napoleon and 
commander of the Fort de Joux, enters Toussaint’s cell and demands his military effects; 
“Citoyen Louverture/ Je viens vous prévenir que par cet arrêté/ Notre premier [sic] 
Consul veut qu’il vous soit ôté/ le chapeau militaire ainsi que l’uniforme [Citizen 
Louverture/ I have come to inform you that by this decree/Our First Consul wishes that 
you be stripped of/ your military hat as well as your uniform.]”27 By referring to 
Toussaint as “citoyen,” Amyot ironically accords the revolutionary leader a sign of 
respect while simultaneously stripping him of the visible markers of his resistance to 
French colonialism. With a barely visible sign of physical pain, Toussaint hands Amyot 
his regalia, revealing not only an emotional reaction to his defamation, but also showing 
the physical effects of this not-so-private shaming. Mars serves to remind the viewers and 
the readers of Toussaint’s anguish, “Alors la Nation/ veut ajouter l’outrage à 
l’humiliation? [So the Nation wishes to add insult to injury?”]28 Toussaint begins to 
speak, presumably to explain to Mars why he acquiesces to Amyot’s request, but he is 
68 
interrupted by Amyot who hands him bourgeois clothing. Toussaint rejects the clothing, 
saying: 
 
Gardez-les, citoyen. Encor [sic] que je frisonne,  
 Et quoique mes haillons soient glacés sous ces toits, 
 Je ne porterai pas ce vêtement bourgeois. 
 […]  
Je veux qu[e Napoléon] sache, au moins, que c’est sous ses drapeaux, 
Que c’est sous les boulets, que c’est sous la mitraille,  
Le fusil à la main, souvent dans la bataille,  
Le sabre nu, j’ai conquis, ainsi que lui, 
Ma réputation, ma gloire d’aujourd’hui.  
Mes titres, je les dois à votre République.  
Il ne peut pas ternir ce temps plus qu’héroïque.  
Dites le lui pour moi, s’il semble l’oublier.  
Si Bonaparte croit pouvoir m’humilier…  
 
[Keep them, citizen. Still I shiver, 
 And regardless of whether my breath freezes beneath this roof, 
 I will never wear this bourgeois attire. 
 […] 
 I want Napoleon to know, at the very least, that it is under his flags, 
 It is behind his cannonballs, it is under fire, 
 With rifle in hand, often in battle,  
 Sabre bare, I conquered, just as he, 
 My reputation, my glory today.  
 My titles, I owe them to your Republic. 
 He cannot tarnish this more than heroic moment. 
 Tell him for me, because he seems to forget. 
 Si Bonaparte believes he can humiliate me…]29 
 
Without changing his tenor, Toussaint reproaches Amyot for offering him civilian and 
bourgeois clothing. Even though Toussaint willingly surrenders his military garb, he 
refuses to falsely present himself as a typical French bourgeois. As Philip Kaisary notes 
in his discussion of visual representations of Toussaint, the Saint-Dominguan governor 
frequently dressed in French military regalia.30 This is not surprising, considering that the 
French appointed Toussaint a general to lead expeditions into the Spanish side of Saint-
Domingue to wage war with the Spanish and the English. In the above passage, Ducasse 
69 
is attentive not only to Toussaint’s physical suffering due to the frigid heights of the Jura, 
but also the psychological effects of humiliation. Second, Toussaint recognizes that 
France granted him his official titles, but his reputation is of his own construction. Lastly, 
like his rejection of French clothing, Toussaint dislodges Saint-Domingue from France by 
referring to France as “votre République,” or Amyot’s and Napoleon’s France. By 
separating the two, Toussaint declares a sort of, however flawed, Saint-Dominguan 
independence. Unlike the historical Toussaint, Ducasse’s Toussaint breaks from the “free 
and French” model proposed by the 1801 constitution. Instead, it reads “free and Saint-
Dominguan” as Toussaint and Mars continue to refer to “mon pays” and “ma race” as 
separate entities from France.31 
 After Amyot exits the stage, he cedes his antagonistic role to General Caffarelli 
who immediately begins interrogating Toussaint, despite his waning health. From 
Caffarelli’s first lines, it is clear that he is a manifestation of Napoleonic despotism. He 
enters Toussaint’s cell, declaring, “Citoyen Louverture,/ Si vous souffrez, c’est vous qui 
le voulez, je jure./ Si vous dites bien vite où gisent les trésors/ Immenses, enfouis aux 
mornes du Cahors,/ Croyez-moi, je mets fin à vos cuisantes peines,/ En faisant tomber à 
l’instant vos chaînes [Citizen Louverture,/ If you suffer, it is you who wishes it, I assure 
you./ If you tell me where the treasure lies/ Immense, stashed in the hills of Cahors./ 
Believe me, I will put an end to your meaningless suffering,/ By releasing this instant 
from your chains.]”32 (16) While still employing republican decorum, it is important to 
note the sadistic nature of Caffarelli’s remarks. By imprisoning Toussaint and Mars, 
France has reduced them to the status of slaves, once again in chains. Furthermore, the 
only means of manumission depends on the master’s volition.33 In what follows, during 
70 
Toussaint’s interrogation, Ducasse reveals the pernicious nature of French colonial 
nostalgia. In doing so, Ducasse creates a Toussaint who, playing on Caffarelli’s 
glorification for Napoleonic France, envisions a separation from France in order to 
forever banish slavery and involuntary servitude from Saint-Domingue.   
 Throughout his interrogation of Toussaint, Caffarelli is concerned with rumors 
that the Saint-Dominguan general possesses hidden treasure, which provides a context for 
his display of colonial nostalgia.34 Prior to the Haitian Revolution, Saint-Domingue was 
the most profitable colony and, for France, the revolution left a massive economic 
burden.35 Caffarelli essentially blames the revolution and disorder on Toussaint’s lust for 
power, rather than result of a collective rejection of the subhuman humiliation of 
plantation slavery:  
Non, c’est vous qui fûtes l’artisan  
De votre propre chute. Habile et malfaisant, 
Vous vous êtes joué trop souvent de la France, 
En trompant son désir, sa plus noble espérance, 
Sous prétexte toujours de servir le pays. 
Que de fois, sans trembler, vous nous avez trahi [sic]!  
Naguère encore, lorsque, transportées par nos flottes, 
Nos soldats étonnés débarquaient sur vos côtes,  
Étalant vos projets par les plus noirs desseins,  
Plutôt que de vous livrer St-Domingue en nos mains,  
Vous avez mieux aimé incendier vos villes, 
Déchaîner les horreurs des disputes civiles, 
Semer partout la faim ainsi que le trépas, 
Mais toujours vaincus, battus à chaque pas, 
Vous avez payé vos crimes par vos défaites ; 
Tous ces combats pour les nôtres, c’étaient des fêtes. 
Enivré des appas d’un dessein trop hardi, 
Vous pensiez tenir tête aux hommes de Lodi, 
Aux illustres soldats de notre République, 
Vous, les viles rejetons arrachés à l’Afrique ! 
 [No, it is you who was the artisan 
 Of your own fall. Skilled and evildoing, 
 You have too often toyed with France 
71 
 In deceiving its desire, its most noble hopes, 
 Always under the pretext of serving the country. 
 How many times, without hesitation, have you betrayed us! 
 Not long ago, when, transported by our flotillas, 
 Our surprised soldiers debarked onto your coasts, 
 Spreading your projects of the darkest designs, 
 Rather than delivering Saint-Domingue to our hands,  
 You preferred to set fire to your cities, 
 To unleash the horrors of civil disputes, 
 To sow hunger and death far and wide, 
 But always vanquished, headed off at every pass, 
You have paid for your crimes through your defeats; 
All these battles were a delight for our soldiers. 
Intoxicated by the charms of such a bold design, 
You though you could stand up to the men of Lodi, 
To the illustrious soldiers of our Republic, 
You, the vile beings ripped from Africa!]36 
 
Channeling Leclerc’s rhetorical characterization of Toussaint, Caffarelli accuses 
Toussaint of seditious perfidy while simultaneously evoking the notion of white French 
plight during the Haitian Revolution. According to Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, France is 
the real victim of Toussaint’s actions and Saint-Domingue is held captive. 
 What is more, in Caffarelli’s figuration, Saint-Domingue and France appear to be 
separate entities, even separate nations like Toussaint and Mars suggested in the previous 
two scenes. Caffarelli, in the speech above, creates a tension between the 
“nous/nos/notre/nôtres [We/ours]” (France and its soldiers) and the “vous/vos/votre 
[you/yours]” (Saint-Domingue and Toussaint). First, Toussaint, the second person 
singular/formal “you/vous,” is guilty for having betrayed the French, the second person 
plural “nous/we.” While this might seem like an inclusive measure, effectively folding 
Toussaint and the revolutionary masses into the French Republic, Caffarelli quickly 
dismisses that possibility by referring to France and Saint-Domingue as separate, 
potentially autonomous entities. In the following four lines, the French are presented in 
72 
opposition to the revolutionaries/Toussaint, suggesting that they are not of the same 
country or nation: “Nos soldats étonnés débarquaient sur vos côtes,/ Étalant vos projets 
par les plus noirs desseins,/ Plutôt que de vous livrer St-Domingue en nos mains,/ Vous 
avez mieux aimé incendier vos villes.”37 Even though there is the semantic distinction 
between the “nous” and “vous” as well as the “nos” and “vos,” Ducasse’s Caffarelli 
directly implies that Toussaint is the owner and the sovereign leader of Saint-Domingue. 
By referring to the island as “vos villes” rather than “nos villes,” or French cities d’outre-
mer, Caffarelli suggests that Toussaint and Saint-Domingue are, in fact, independent of 
France.38 This, of course, fits neatly within the French fears about Toussaint’s 1801 
constitution because there is no such historical admission by France or French officials in 
1801. To do so would have suggested defeat, and the success of the Haitian Revolution 
two years prior to the coup de grâce at the battle of Vertières.39 It is true that the French 
accepted Toussaint as the Governor of Saint-Domingue, for a time, but the final two lines 
of Caffarelli’s accusation create further distance between the idea of Saint-Domingue and 
the idea of France. France is a republic, with a great history of world conquest – 
Caffarelli later rhapsodizes about the Napoleonic wars in Italy and Austria – whereas 
Saint-Domingue is an island of “vile people taken from Africa.”  
 However, Toussaint is quick to counter Caffarelli’s glorification of Napoleon and 
the French by memorializing Haitians and the anticolonial sentiment of the revolution. In 
order to capture the complexity of Toussaint’s summary of history and methodical 
deconstruction of French colonialism I quote the following passage at length: 
Voilà mes hauts faits et voilà mes trophées !  
Ces lieux ont vu finir les luttes étouffées, 
Car Anglais, Espagnols, tout devant moi. 
J’étais sincère alors,  parce que j’avais foi  
73 
Dans les droits proclamés en vos moments critiques ; 
J’avais foi dans vos preux, vos grands fous héroïques 
Qui s’appelaient Marat, Brissot, Vergniaud, Danton, 
St-Juste, et Mirabeau, Robespierre et Couthon. 
J’avais foi dans vos cris, j’avais foi dans vos larmes. 
J’ai vu la liberté surgir de vos alarmes. 
Lorsque quatre-vingt-treize eut mangé ses enfants, 
Ses enfants les meilleurs et les plus triomphants ; 
Lorsque les droits de l’homme étaient l’ignominie 
Lorsque la liberté devint la tyrannie ; 
Et lorsque la terreur eut perdu la raison. 
Pour moi, je vis briller un nouvel horizon. 
Mais alors, cette foi s’était donc ébranlée. 
J’entendis soupirer l’Afrique mutilée, 
J’entendis sangloter ma race et mon pays 
Et je revis les fers de mes frères haïs. 
Et mon cœur révolté de l’éternel outrage, 
Osa rêver pour eux un berceau de feuillage 
Si vous ètes [sic] français comme le fier Brissot, 
Grégoire, Pétion, Condorcet, et Vergniaud ;  
Si les grands sentiments savent hanter votre âme, 
Si votre cœur n’est pas d’un égoisme [sic] infame [sic], 
Etant donné mes fers, vos préjugés sanglants 
Vous comprendrez mon rôle en présence des blancs. 
 
[Here are my doings and here are my trophies! 
These places saw the end of suffocating battles, 
The English, the Spanish, everything before me. 
I was sincere, because I had faith 
In the rights proclaimed in your critical moments;  
I had faith in your grand, crazy heroes 
Those named Marat, Brissot, Verniaud, Danton, 
St-Juste, and Mirabeau, Robespierre et Couthon. 
I had faith in your cries, I had faith in your tears. 
I saw freedom surge from your call to arms. 
When ninety-three had eaten its children, 
Its best and most triumphant children; 
When the Rights of Man were a disgraceful act 
When freedom became tyranny; 
And when the Terror had lost its Reason. 
For me, I saw a new shining horizon. 
But even still, my faith had been shaken. 
I heard the sighs of mutilated Africa, 
I heard the cries of my race and my country 
And I saw once again the irons and my hated brothers. 
And my heart revolted from eternal outrage, 
74 
Dared to dream for them a cradle of foliage 
If you are French like the proud Brissot, 
Grégoire, Pétion, Condorcet, et Vergniaud  
If grandiose sentiments know how to haunt your soul, 
If your heart is not infamously self-centered, 
Given my irons, and your bloody prejudices 
You would understand my role in the presence of Whites.]40 
 
This impassioned speech ultimately causes Caffarelli to leave Toussaint’s cell, visibly 
moved by his adversary’s reasoning. Toussaint juxtaposes the seemingly clear-minded 
benevolence of French abolitionists with advocates for the slave trade and colonial 
slavery and the champions of the Enlightenment and Republican Universalism with the 
most infamous perpetrators of the Reign of Terror to suggest that France, as well, has a 
troubled relationship with freedom and human rights.  
 
Figure 4.1 Toussaint Louverture on his deathbed printed in Fort de Joux, artist 
unknown.41 
 
In a dramatic turn of events, Toussaint ultimately convinces Caffarelli that he and 
those complicit in the suffering of enslaved Africans and the Haitian masses need to 
repent for their hypocrisy. In the end, Caffarelli does demand Toussaint’s pardon, but in 
doing so he recognizes that he “serves a master” (Napoleon) and was merely following 
75 
orders.42 It is this admission of defeat that allows Toussaint, when he slips into a delirious 
state, to predict the fall of French colonialism with the declaration of Haitian 
independence: 
Ils brandissaient le joug qu’ils venaient de détruire. 
       (haletant) 
Ils avaient à leurs fronts des joyaux et des fleurs… 
Ils portaient un drapeau flottant, aux deux couleurs… 
C’étaient des pleurs de joie et des cris de vengeance… 
« A bas les égorgeurs, VIVE L’INDEPENDANCE ! » 
 
[Brandishing the yoke they just destroyed 
      (breathing) 
 They wore jewels and flowers on their heads… 
 They carried a flag floating, of two colors… 
 There were tears of joy and cries of vengeance… 
 “Down with the cut-throats, LONG LIVE INDEPENDENCE!”]43 
 
It is worth noting that Ducasse employs the past tense when describing the declaration of 
independence. Although Toussaint never saw the end of the Haitian Revolution, Ducasse 
uses his final moments to not only memorialize one of the most influential Haitian 
revolutionaries, but also to commemorate the accomplishments of the Armée Indigène. 
Furthermore, while Toussaint is the undeniable hero of Ducasse’s historical drama, the 
final images are of events brought to fruition under Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In not 
mentioning Dessalines, Ducasse revises the heroic model of storytelling, attributing the 
creation of the Haitian flag and the declaration of independence to the Haitian masses 
instead of a single individual through the use of the third person plural “ils.” However, in 
the reproduction of Fort de Joux, ou les derniers moments de Toussaint Louverture, we 
are left with the image of Toussaint dead in his cell, still chained to this bed (figure 4.1). 
Ostensibly a product of the reproduction of the play produced by the labors of Antoine 
76 
Innocent and Éditions Veteran, Fort de Joux also features an illustration on the 
frontispiece (figure 4.2). 
 
Figure 3.2 Frontispiece to Fort de Joux, ou les derniers moments de Toussaint 
Louverture.  
 
By featuring Toussaint’s inanimate body in chains, the play ends with the looming return 
of French colonial retribution but also ruptures Toussaint’s dream-like vision of Haitian 
independence in 1804 and thrusts the reader back into the chilly cell in the Fort de Joux 
in April 1803. Whether or not Ducasse meant for the illustrations to figure into his play, 
the final image perfectly resonates with Toussaint’s anticolonial rhetoric and skepticism 
towards French republicanism throughout the play. Toussaint’s dying in chains stands as 
a reminder of the violence of his kidnapping, torture, and murder under the watchful eye 
of Napoleon. 
Conclusion: Visualizing Haitian Heroes and History at Center Stage 
 In the final words of the Fort de Joux, Vendenesse Ducasse characterizes Haitian 
independence as a collective effort. However, the text, like the theatrical representation, 
shifts from Toussaint, to the masses, and finally back to the image of Toussaint 
Louverture dying in his prison cell at center stage. This movement of Toussaint to the 
77 
center stage, is constitutive of the manner in which Haitian history is often represented 
through one individual. In her work on memory studies and postmemory, Marianne 
Hirsch contends that images offer a way for those who did not witness a particular event 
to participate in its memorialization. Furthermore, Hirsch argues that it is the “iconic and 
symbolic power [of images that] makes it a uniquely powerful medium for the 
transmission of events that remain unimaginable.”44 In the Éditions Veteran printing of 
Fort de Joux, we see this centering of Toussaint visually rendered as a reminder that, 
despite his body being inanimate, he is at the center of this particular episode in the 
history of the Haitian Revolution. Ducasse does, in fact, trouble this centering of 
individuals when he invokes the Haitian masses in the final five lines of the play. One of 
the most evocative images from these lines is the carrying of the new Haitian flag, which 
is shown in a collective light rather than being attributed, as the creation of the flag often 
is, to Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In concluding my discussion of Fort de Joux, I argue that 
Ducasse’s representation reflects a nuanced interpretation of the centering of history 
around individuals present in visual representations of Haitian independence as depicted 
in portraiture like, Dessalines Ripping the White from the Flag (figure 4.3).45
 
78 
Figure 4.3 Dessalines Ripping the White from the Flag (oil on canvas 76.2x91.4 cm.) by 
Madsen Mompremier (1995) held by UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Los 
Angeles, California. (http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/collections/objects/x95-22-5) 
 
 Ducasse makes the shift from Toussaint, the “Je/I,” to the “Ils/masses” in the final 
lines of Fort de Joux and the play, just like one could imagine the action unfolding on 
stage, features Toussaint dying in the middle of the stage. This movement from Toussaint 
to the masses and back to Toussaint can also be seen, however, in reverse in Madsen 
Mompremier’s Dessalines Ripping the White from the Flag (1995). In the painting, the 
principle action takes place in the center as Dessalines cuts the white out of the French 
tricolore with the help of the spirits above. This diagonal movement from the bottom left 
to the upper right hand corner of the painting helps to centralize Dessalines in the same 
way that the vertical reading of the play, from the top of the page to the bottom, allows 
for centering Toussaint. However, when the portrait is viewed horizontally, the subjects 
of the painting widen out from Dessalines and we see the following movement from the 
masses to Dessalines to the spiritual and living tricoteuses responsible for uniting the red 
and the blue, forming the new Haitian flag. While the stitching is part of the vibrant 
movement in the painting, the main action is represented in the title Dessalines Ripping 
the White from the Flag. In the final moments of Ducasses’s Fort de Joux the masses are 
the ones who are mobile, they are the ones throwing off the yoke of colonialism and 
slavery, they are the ones crying tears of joy and wearing crowns of laurels as they carry 
around the newly formed Haitian flag. It is only though the image of Toussaint printed at 
the bottom of the page where readers are transported back to the holding cell in the Fort 
de Joux. Finally, in Ducasse’s figuration of Haitian independence, it is the cry of the 
masses, rather than of an individual, that rings out “A bas les égorgeurs, VIVE 
79 
L’INDEPENDANCE! [Down with the cut-throats, LONG LIVE INDEPENDENCE!]” 
Even though Ducasse, as well as many other writers throughout history, recreates the 
final moments of Toussaint Louverture’s life in the Fort de Joux prison, we can see how 
the collective nature of Haitian history still filters through the representation of a singular 
moment and figure. 
80 
Chapter 5 
Conclusion: Parchment Pasts, Digital Futures: The Haitian Theatrical Archive 
“My motivation to tell a different story came from a moral imperative, driven by sentiment and several 
points of recognition. The first was intellectual awareness that the Haiti in the public domain was a 
rhetorically and symbolically incarcerated one, trapped in singular narratives and clichés that, 
unsurprisingly, hardly moved beyond stereotypes. Second, for that reason, it was necessary that such 
perceptions be challenged. Third, complex ideas about Haiti circulating in the academy stayed among 
academics, rarely trickling outward. – Gina Athena Ulysse, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-
Quake Chronicle1 
 
I first encountered the theatrical works of Juste Chanlatte thanks to Jean 
Jonaissant’s exploratory article “Toward New Paradigms in Caribbean Studies: The 
Impact of the Haitian Revolution in Our Literatures” in Doris L. Garraway’s volume The 
Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World.2 
Jonaissant plots out future tracks of research into Haitian and Caribbean literary studies, 
with a particular emphasis on theater and its role as a form of Haitian historiographical 
intervention. He also tells the story of one of Chanlatte’s plays, seemingly lost forever, 
called Nerhi. Jonaissant explains that the title is an anagram of Henri, or Henry 
Christophe, the first and only king of the Northern Kingdom of Haiti who ruled from 
1811 until his suicide brought the monarchy tumbling down amidst widespread 
insurrection in 1820. Two of Chanlatte’s other plays, presumably less intriguing for 
Jonaissant in terms of a historiographical intervention, L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale 
(1818) and La Partie de chase du roi (1820), have already been recovered and digitized 
so that we maybe able to, once again, analyze their contribution a Haitian theatrical 
corpus. It is through the digital archive of the Caribbean that these plays, so rare that they 
require special permissions to view in-person, are once again accessible to a readership. It 
is through the digital that we now know that the play Jonaissant referenced is called 
Nerhi ; ou le chef des Haytiens and its original publishing date of 1819, squarely between 
Chanlatte’s other two plays.3  
81 
Given the various boundaries and obstacles facing the study of Haitian theater, the 
time to re-think the archive is upon us. The most effective, democratic, and even cost-
effective manner of increasing accessibility to Haitian theater is through the digital turn 
in humanities research, particularly through the nascent field of Caribbean digital studies. 
Panning out from the close readings of plays by Juste Chanlatte, Vendenesse Ducasse, 
and Massillon Coicou, I am suggesting that this field of study demands new ways of 
interpreting the Haitian theatrical archive through the digital. The research I have done 
through digital platforms, has led to evaluating new modes of interpretation that the 
digital provides as well as acknowledging those that, in a post-tactile age of reading, are 
forever lost. The foundation for new narratives for Haiti can found in those that are lost 
or have been silenced due to the conditions of the archive and its preservation prior to the 
era of digitization. 
The research that I have conducted for this study is theoretically feasible without 
embracing the digital archive.  I could perhaps have traveled to the various archives in the 
world, held the objects themselves, and attempted to grasp the spirit of the object as well 
as the knowledge within. However, this is not the most pragmatic approach and in many 
ways still is not possible. For instance, in order to get a copy of presumably the only 
known copy of La Partie de chasse du roi from the University of Indiana, Bloomington I 
had to engage in a series of negotiations with interlibrary loan staff and rare collections 
liaisons just to have a scanned version of the play. Either one of these options requires 
more than just a simple Internet connection to access Chanlatte’s play. Even in the digital 
archive, the question of accessibility is marred not only in institutional politics, but on a 
very basic level, on access to financial resources that only exist inside the academy.  
82 
 
Figure 5.1 Frontispiece to La Partie de chasse du roi, Opéra en trois actes, courtesy of 
The University of Indiana, Bloomington Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscripts 
collection 
The digital archive also radically changes the types of sources to which we have 
access and the ways in which we read them. For instance, my interaction with La Partie 
de chasse du roi source is indelibly marked, in a digital age, by the metallic hands in the 
margins of my hi-resolution photocopies (see figure 5.1). The metallic hands serve as a 
marker of the precious nature of this object, so rare that the cold, steely metal reminds us 
of the elusive past of this document. The imprint of the Imprimerie de San-Souci 
emblazoned on the frontispiece serves as a relic of Henry Christophe’s nine-year reign as 
the only Haitian monarch. The press itself was the ultimate publicist for the Kingdom of 
Haiti and its attempts to foster international relations, to create a national body of 
literature and philosophy that we see in texts by Chanlatte and Pompée Valentin Baron de 
83 
Vastey, and to establish a Haitian society of nobles that we find in the Almanach Royals 
printed from 1811-1820 (see figure 5.2). 
 
Figure 5.2 Almanach royal d’Hayti pour l’année bissextile 1820, Dix-Septième de 
l’indépendance, et la neuvième du règne de sa majesté, présenté au roi, par Buon. Sans 
Souci: Imprimerie Royale, 1820. Held by the Shomburg Center at the New York Public 
Library Digital Collections: (http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/65693621-680b-
d2d1-e040-e00a180646d9). 
Through the increased democratization of access to sources and archival material, a 
Haitian literary-historical corpus has, and continues to, become a profound and complex 
wealth of writing. After the digital turn in the humanities, texts like Émeric Bergeaud’s 
Stella and Pompée Valentin Baron de Vastey’s Le Système colonial dévoilé have been 
subsequently translated and made available to an Anglophone readership for the first 
84 
time. While theater has not quite reached this stage of scholarship, the digital format 
offers readers the possibility to study the intricacies of rare manuscripts. For instance, as 
Marlene Daut points out in Tropics of Haiti, the University of Indiana, Bloomington’s 
copy of La Partie de chasse du roi features an inscription in the dust jacket, (see figure 
5.3) saying: “Very rare – not to be purchased now a days – a curious – dramatic 
production – printed and performed in Hayti  – before King Henry the nigger.”4 
 
Figure 4.3 Inscription from inside cover of La Partie de chasse du roi by Juste Chanlatte, 
Comte de Rosiers (1820) held by the University of Indiana, Bloomington Lilly Library, 
Rare Books and Manuscripts. 
In this unique inscription, available to us through digitization, we can interpret the 
particular history of this copy of La Partie de chasse du roi, the circumstances that led to 
its dissemination, and its eventual acquisition by the Rare Books and Manuscripts archive 
at a major research university thousands of miles from the press that printed it nearly two 
hundred years ago. This type of research is fruitful not only in the sense that they reveal a 
85 
particular discourse, a racist one in the example of Chanlatte’s play, but also that rare 
books research done through the digital humanities can help trace circles of intellectuals, 
particularly those connected to Haiti and its rich theatrical history. In 1906 Antoine 
Innocent, a well established Haitian actor and journalist, wrote and published his only 
novel Mimola; ou l’histoire d’une cassette about vodou and the origins of peasant life in 
Haiti. In the edition of Mimola held by Harvard University, Innocent provides a personal 
inscription for the book’s future owner, anthropologist and ethnologist Louis-Joseph 
Janvier (See figure 5.4).5 The inscription reads: “Très cher maître M. Louis Joseph 
Janvier – témoignage de profonde admiration A[ntoine] Innocent [Very dear teacher Mr. 
Louis Joseph Janvier – in recognition of profound admiration. A[ntoine] Innocent].” As 
these two examples of rare Haitian books show, there are important literary-historical 
tracks of research to be conducted in the field of Haitian studies under the umbrella of the 
digital humanities. The era of digitization affords, at least in these two cases, a relatively 
democratic means of accessing these intimate narratives, hidden within the physical 
objects themselves, that provide new ways for us to access and recount Haitian history. 
 
Figure 4.4 Inscription in Mimola; ou l’histoire d’une cassette (1906) by Antoine 
Innocent. Accessed via Google Books.6 
86 
 I now return to the epigraph by Gina Athena Ulysse and what she refers to as a 
“rhetorically and symbolically incarcerated” intellectual awareness of Haiti. In 
researching this study it was not rare for me to hear comments by university-educated 
people, “Haiti, they have theater?” or “There was a revolution in Haiti?” While the urge 
to ignore these uniformed statements is more than appealing, I take them instead as 
confirmation of a lack of intellectual rigor that has surrounded Haiti since Jean-Jacques 
Dessalines declared Haitian independence on January 1, 1804. First, I cite Ulysse because 
she indicates the need to change the perceptions of Haiti, to intervene into (anti) 
intellectual debates about Haiti in order to render Haiti and its history in a complex and 
rigorous manner. Ulysse, like Haitian playwrights, share the same notion of praxis when 
it comes to history and narrative because the stories we tell about Haiti have a human 
impact. Vendenesse Ducasse, the author of Fort de Joux; ou les derniers moments de 
Toussaint Louverture (1896), had a vision for theater as a means of public education. In a 
sense, theater could instruct major tenants of Haitian history to the masses, making up for 
the historically elite nature of schooling in Haiti.  
Finally, Ulysse argues that by making history public, taking it out of the realm of the 
academy, and accessible, more people will be able to engage in and participate in the 
challenging the public representations of a place and its people. Ulysse completes her 
reflection on public history and representation by citing Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who 
writes, “Long before average citizens read historians who set the standards of the day for 
colleagues and students, they access history through celebrations, site and museum visits, 
movies, national holidays and primary school books.”7 To be sure, Trouillot’s words still 
ring true more than twenty years later as representations circulate furiously inside and 
87 
outside of the academy. However, as I have shown, the Internet and the digital 
humanities have become one of the most accessible grounds for the contestation of 
misrepresentations. In fact, Ulysse’s book itself was borne out of blog posts published in 
various different online venues. As the Internet and the digital age rages on, there is an 
intellectual imperative to digitize, curate and contest singular representations of history 
and culture through the use of the digital tools and the digital humanities. The future of 
the Haitian theatrical archive, without a doubt, is intimately entwined in these processes 
and its future depends on the use of the digital to make Haitian theater, as Ducasse would 
have it, a tool of public education.  
88 
Notes
                                                
Chapter 1 
1 Innocent, Antoine. Mimola, ou L’histoire d’une cassette: Petit tableau de mœurs 
locales. (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie E. Malvál, 1906) xi. 
2 Ducasse, Vendenesse. (Fort de Joux, ou, Les derniers moments de Toussaint 
Louverture: drame historique en un acte. Port-au-Prince, Haïit: Éditions Vétéran, 1957) 
iii.  
3 For an analysis of Haitian politics, see: Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Haiti, State against 
Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 
1990. 
4 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, iii. 
5 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. 
Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, 82-83. 
6 For further investigation into the “thinkability” of the Haitian Revolution, see: 
Sepinwall, Alyssa Goldstein. "Still Unthinkable?: The Haitian Revolution and the 
Reception of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past." Journal of Haitian Studies 
19.2 (2013): 75-103. 
7 Daut, Marlene. Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian 
Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865. (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 
2015) 3. 
8 Influential volumes on the Age of Revolutions include: Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity 
Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolutions. Durham: Duke 
University Press, 2004.; Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of 
Revolution, 1770-1823. Oxford: Oxford Uinversity Press, 1999.; and Armitage, David 
and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, 1760-1840. New 
York: Palgrave, 2010. Also worth note is the digital turn toward academic commentary 
on the Age of Revolution in a blog post format – see the editorial work of Brian Banks 
and Cindy Ermus at www.ageofrevolutions.com.  
9 Innocent, Mimola; ou l’histoire d’une cassette, xi. 
89 
                                                                                                                                            
10 Scott, David. The Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. 
(Durham, Duke University Press, 2004) 9-10. 
11 James, CLR. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo 
Revolution. (New York: Vintage, 1962) 82. 
12 James, The Black Jacobins, 393. 
13 Johnson, Sara E. The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the 
Revolutionary Americas. (Berkley, University of California Press, 2012) 192. 
14 Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today. 29.1 (Spring 
2008): 106. 
15 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 111. 
16 Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Metropolitan Books, 
2012.  
17 See Dayan, Colin (Joan). Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkley: University of 
California Press, 1996.  
Chapter 2 
1 “Hayti.” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, Volume VIII. Ser. III, 
January, 1821: 112-134. 
2 Digitized copy accessed via: Gaffield, Julia. “I Have Avenged America.” Haitidoi.com. 
Aug. 2, 2013. Web. December 14, 2015. (http://haitidoi.com/2013/08/02/i-have-avenged-
america/) Julia Gaffield was kind enough to direct me to her blog on the Haitian 
Declaration of Independence through an exchange on Twitter. Her work, as well as that 
of many others, has been instrumental in amplifying the number of available sources and 
commentary on Haitian historical documents online.    
3 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex and Manuscripts in the Haitian 
Revolution. (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2012) 89. 
4 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 90. 
5 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 81-120. 
6 For examples of this type of literary and cultural analysis, see: Jonaissant, Jean. 
“Toward New Paradigms in Caribbean Studies: The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on 
Our Literatures.” Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the 
90 
                                                                                                                                            
Atlantic World, ed. Doris L. Garraway. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 
2008. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of 
Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Daut, Marlene. Tropics of Haiti: Race 
and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865. 
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. 
7 Pompée Valentin Baron de Vastey (1781-1820) was a poet and statesman under Henry 
Christophe who was the main scribe for the King. In 1814, Vastey published his scathing 
indictment of colonial slavery entitled Le Système colonial dévoilé, which was 
immediately reviewed in British, French, German, Spanish and US newspapers. See: 
Daut, Marlene. “From Classical French Poet to Militant Haitian Statesman: The Early 
Years and Poetry of the Baron de Vastey.” Research in African Literatures. 43.1 (Spring 
2012): 35-57.   
Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers (1766-1828) was a poet, playwright, 
newspaper editor, librarian, and secretary in Haiti from the dawn of independence until 
his death. He served as secretary to Jean-Jacques Dessalines from 1804 until his 
assassination in October 1806. Later, under Henry Christophe’s monarchy, Chanlatte 
held various positions from librarian to newspaper editor for the Gazette Royale d’Haïti, 
and official playwright to the king. Chanlatte worked as a secretary under Jean-Pierre 
Boyer’s republic where he experienced great poverty.  
8 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 257. Fischer is attentive to Chanlatte’s literary 
production in the Kingdom of Haiti, but signals that there is much work to be done, 
critical and archival, to fully understand the role literature played in Christophe’s 
kingdom. Examples of historical and philosophical texts written between under Henry 
Christophe include: Le Système colonial dévoilé by Baron de Vastey (1814) and Le Cri 
de la nature by Juste Chanlatte (1810). 
9 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 92-93. 
10 In his Histoire de la littérature haïtienne, Ghislain Gouraige argues that Chanlatte’s 
poetry is bland and is not representative of an original style. Similarly, Émeric 
Bergeaud’s Stella, the first Haitian novel, has historically been deemed unworthy of 
further study because of its mimesis of French literary conventions. For more on 
91 
                                                                                                                                            
Bergeaud and the critical reception of Stella, see the Lesley S. Curtis and Christen 
Mucher’s introduction to their recent translation Bergeaud, Émeric. Stella: A Novel of the 
Haitian Revolution. Trans. Leslie S. Curtis and Christen Mucher. New York: NYU Press, 
2015. 
11 “Hayti,” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 114. 
12 “Hayti,” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 119. 
13 “Hayti.” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 120, my emphasis. 
14 For more on Haitian resistance of French colonialism under Christophe see: Daut, 
Tropics of Haiti. The fear of colonial retribution in the form of genocide originates with 
the Leclerc expedition in 1802 where General Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc was 
sent to overthrow Toussaint Louverture’s government and re-install slavery on the island. 
After Leclerc’s death General Donatien Rochambeau would take over the expedition, 
often using genocidal tactics in order to wage war against Haitian forces as well as 
civilians. For a literary rendering of the Leclerc expedition see: Fignolé, Jean-Claude. 
Une heure pour l’éternité. Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2008. 
15 “Hayti,” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 125.  
16 “Hayti,” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 130. For historical 
commentary on Henry Christophe and education see: Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The 
Aftershocks of History. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012) 69-73; Trouillot, Hénock. 
Le Gouvernement du roi Christophe. (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Centrale, 1972) 87-91. 
17 Daut, Marlene, Tropics of Haiti, 112. 
18 Hayti,” The North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal, 112. 
19 Daut, Marlene, Tropics of Haiti, 112. 
20 The Almanach royal d’Hayti from 1816 and 1820 lists Le Comte de Rosiers as having 
various titles, such as: librarian, accountant, and a member of the nobility as well as an 
actor and supporter of the royal theater.  
21 This is Chanlatte’s official title on the frontispieces of his three plays: L’Entrée du roi 
en sa capitale, en janvier 1818 (1818), Nerhi, le chef des Haytiens (1819), and La Partie 
de chasse du roi (1820). 
22 Clive Cheesman and Marie-Lucie Vendryes, The Armorial of Haiti: Symbols of 
Nobility in the Reign of Henry Christophe. (London: College of Arms, 2007) 90. 
92 
                                                                                                                                            
23 Dessalines, “I Have Avenged America” 
24 Dessalines, “I Have Avenged America,” emphasis in original. 
25 According to a translated account of Henry Christophe’s tour of the Kingdom of Haiti 
in 1814, he is said to have entered Cap Henry only to pass through “triumphal arches 
adorned with flowers and garland” as the king greeted his subjects. In this same 
description of Christophe’s travels, the Chester Chronicle (UK) reports that many plays 
were staged along the way, including Jean Racine’s comedy Les Plaideurs and André 
Grétry’s comedic-opera Richard Cœur-de-lion. “Kingdom of Hayti.” Chester Chronicle. 
2 December, 1814. This account is a translation of the same story from the Gazette Royal 
d’Haïti on January 26, 1814.    
26 Chanlatte, Juste. L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, en janvier 1818. (Sans Souci: 
Imprimerie Royale, 1818) 1. 
27 Dessalines, “I Have Avenged America” 
28 “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingo only the trunk of the tree of 
liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep” quoted in 
James, CLR. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo 
Revolution. (New York: Vintage, 1962) 334 
29 See: Geggus, David. “The Naming of Haiti” in Haitian Revolutionary Studies. 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 
30 Chanlatte, L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, 32. 
31 Chanlatte, La Partie de chasse du roi, 1. The footnote is included in the original text. 
32 The former capital of Saint-Domingue, “Le Cap” was one of the largest ports in the 
country and the center of colonial cultural life. Later renamed Cap Henry under the reign 
of Henry Christophe and finally changed to its current moniker Cap Haïtien. 
33 Vastey, Pompée Valentin, Baron de. Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil 
Wars of Hayti. (Trans. W.H. M.B. Exeter: Western Luminary Office, 1823) 137.  
34 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 53. 
35 Almanach royal d’Hayti pour l’année bissextile 1820, Dix-Septième de l’indépendance, 
et la neuvième du règne de sa majesté, présenté au roi, par Buon. Sans Souci: Imprimerie 
Royale, 1820. 
93 
                                                                                                                                            
36 Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative; see also: Nesbitt, Nick. Universal Emancipation: 
The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville: University of 
Virginia Press, 2008.; James, The Black Jacobins; and Scott, David. Conscripts of 
Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 
2004. 
37 Chanlatte, La Partie de chasse du roi, 4-5. 
38 McIntosh, Tabitha and Grégory Pierrot. “Henry/Nehri: Domestic Theater and 
International Stagecraft at the Royal Haitian Court.” Haitian Studies Association. 
Université de Montréal, Montréal, CA. 23 October 2015. 
39 Referred to in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed. While Fischer’s use of Doris Sommer’s 
term is in relation to early Haitian constitutions, I wish to suggest that Chanlatte’s plays 
make use of a similar gesture of “nation building” in a literary realm. Even though theater 
does not have the same “legal” ramifications of a constitution, both produce particular 
conceptions of Haiti in the early independence period. Additionally, scholars like Fischer, 
Doris Garraway, and Julia Gaffield among others have noted that Haitian constitutions, 
particularly as they relate to citizenship criteria, are rather ambiguous. If we view this 
ambiguity as a sort of literariness that is free and open to interpretation, constitutions 
produce a fiction not so dissimilar from the fictitious realm of Chanlatte’s theater.  
40 Chanlatte, L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale,  11. 
41 Chanlatte, L’Entrée du roi en sa capitale, 12-13. 
42 In the French historical context, the foundational document of legislative colonialism is 
the Code Noir see, Ghachem, Malick. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Niort, Jean-François. Le Code noir: 
Idées recues sur un texte symbolique. (Paris: Éditions Le Cavalier Bleu, 2015). However, 
in a hemispheric context colonial legislation like the Treaty of Tordesillas signed by King 
Ferdinand II and Queen Isabelle of Spain and João II of Portugal in 1494 that divided the 
Americas between Spain and Portugal.   
43 Christophe, Henry. Manifeste du roi. Cap-Henry: P. Roux, Imprimerie du Roi, 1814. 
44 See Dessalines in the “I Avenged America” speech and in the “Declaration of 
Independence” 
94 
                                                                                                                                            
45 Clive Cheesman and Marie-Lucie Vendryes, The Armorial of Haiti. At the 2015 
Haitian Studies Conference, there were two presentations relating to Chanlatte, see:  
Bongie, Chris. “Reading Voltaire, Remembering Dessalines: The Role of Alzire in Juste 
Chanlatte’s Le Cri de la nature.” Haitian Studies Association. Université de Montréal, 
Montréal, CA. 23 October 2015.  and McIntosh, Tabitha and Grégory Pierrot. 
“Henry/Nehri: Domestic Theater and International Stagecraft at the Royal Haitian 
Court.” They have speculated that Juste Chanlatte was responsible for the innovation of 
Christophe’s royal crest as well as its inscription.  
46 Cheesman and Vendryes, The Armorial of Haiti, 18. 
47 Fick, Carol E. The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below. 
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.  
48 Chanlatte, La Partie de chasse du roi, 60-61 
49 Chanlatte, La Partie de chasse du roi, 62 
50 Chanlatte, La Partie de chasse du roi, p. 62 
51 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing of the Past: Power and Production of History. 
Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. 60 
52 Césaire, Aimé. La Tragédie du roi Christophe. Paris: Présence Africaine, 2009. 
53 Bongie, Chris. “The Cry of History: Juste Chanlatte and the Unsettling (Presence) of 
Race in Early Haitian Literature.” MLN 130.4 (2015): 807–835. 
Chapter 3 
1 Coicou, Massillon. Le génie français et l’âme haïtienne. (Paris: Librairie de la 
renaissance latine, 1904) 1. 
2 Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme is a prime example of the type of 
rhetorical battle the founders of the Mouvement Négritude, where a French, even 
European cultural knowledge is used as the primary method for deconstructing and 
revealing the societal impact of colonialism. Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. 
Paris: Présence Africaine, 1954. 
3 Glissant, Édouard. Monsieur Toussaint. Paris : Gallimard, 1998. 
4Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of 
Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.; Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: 
95 
                                                                                                                                            
Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.; 
Ferrer, Ada. “Talk About Haiti: The Archive and the Atlantic’s Haitian Revolution,” Tree 
of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Ed. Doris 
L. Garraway. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. 21–40.; Daut, Marlene. 
Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic 
World, 1789-1865. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2015. 
5 See, Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today. 29.1 (Spring 
2008): 103-128. 
6 For more on the idea of the “presence of the past,” see: Rousso, Henry. Le Syndrome de 
Vichy, de 1944-à nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 2014.   
7 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 104. 
8 See the following works by literary and historical scholars for a re-assessment of Jean-
Jacques Dessalines’s legacy as an emperor: Gaffield, Julia. Haitian Connections in the 
Atlantic World: Recognition After Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 
Press, 2015.; Garraway, Doris L. Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian 
Revolution in the Atlantic World. Ed. Doris L. Garraway. Charlottesville: University of 
Virginia Press, 2008.; Jenson, Deborah. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Sex, Politics and 
Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2012.;  
Kaisary, Philip. Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, 
Conservative Constraints. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 
9 Coicou, Massillon. L’Empereur dessalines. Acte premier: drame en deux actes et en 
vers. (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Fardin, 1988) v.  
10 These exceptions include the work of literary anthologists such as Lherisson, Lélia. 
Manuel de la littérature haïtienne et textes expliqués. Littérature des Amériques. Port-au-
Prince : Imprimerie du Collège Vertières, 1945.; historian and archivist Hénock Trouillot 
in Les Origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne. Port-au-Prince: Eds. Fardin, 1962.; 
and most recently Zavitz, Erin. “Encountering Creole Genesis in the Haitian Press: 
Massillon Coicou’s fin-de-siècle feuilleton La Noire.” La Española-Isla de Encuentros, 
eds. Jessica Barzen, Hanna Lene Geiger, Silke Jansen. Tübingen: Narr, 2015. As well as 
Zavitz’s dissertation – Zavitz, Erin. “Revolutionary Memories: Celebrating and 
96 
                                                                                                                                            
Commemorating the Haitian Revolution.”diss., University of Florida, 2015. – which is a 
reflection on a century of commemorations of the Haitian Revolution at the center of 
which was Massillon Coicou. Zavitz’s “Encountering Creole Genesis in the Haitian 
Press: Massillon Coicou’s fin-de-siècle feuilleton La Noire,” is the first to attempt a 
(re)reading of Massillon Coicou’s feuilleton on the Haitian Revolution La Noire. Colin 
(Joan) Dayan, Jana Evans Braziel, and Marie-Agnès Sourieau are also among those who 
have mentioned Massillon Coicou’s L’Empereur Dessalines, in particular in relation to 
Défilée Bazile in order to contest the exclusion of women from Haiti’s heroic past. 
11 Trouillot, Les Origines sociales de la littérature haïtienne, 245. 
12 Trouillot, Hénock. Dessalines: Ou, Le Sang Du Pont-Rouge; Théâtre. (Port-au-Prince: 
Imprimerie des Antilles, 1967) 3 
13 Trouillot, Dessalines: Ou, le sang du Pont-Rouge, 3-6. 
14 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, i. 
15 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, i. 
16 Glissant, Édouard. Monsieur Toussaint. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) 9-10; Glissant, 
Édouard. Monsieur Toussaint. Trans. Michael Dash and Édouard Glissant. (Boulder: 
Lynne Renner, 2005) 15-16. Italics in originals. 
17 Kaisary, Philip. The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imaginary: Radical Horizons, 
Conservative Constraints. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014) 111. 
18 Kaisary, The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imaginary, 119. 
19In his article “‘The Haitian Turn’: An Appraisal of Recent Literary and 
Historiographical Works on the Haitian Revolution,” Celucien L. Joseph argues that there 
has been a shift in scholarship in North America regarding the Haitian Revolution and its 
legacy. Part of this shift in thinking is recognizing the Haitian Revolution as a key 
moment in world history, the Age of Revolutions, and a critical moment for evaluating 
notions of freedom, democracy, anticolonialism, human rights, social justice, and 
equality in the postcolonial moment.  
20 Dash, Michael J. “The Theater of the Haitian Revolution/ The Haitian Revolution as 
Theater.” Small Axe 18, (September 2005): 16.  
97 
                                                                                                                                            
21 Le Mémorial ACTE or Centre Caribéen d’Expressions et de Mémoire de la Traite et de 
l’Esclavage, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. 
22 Frantz Duval. “Dessalines Invente Une Liberté Double: Anticolonialiste et 
Antiesclavagiste.” Le Nouvelliste. N.p., 11 May 2015. Web. 22 Mar. 2016. 
23 Jenson, Deborah. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex and Manuscripts in the 
Haitian Revolution. (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2012) 9 
24 For more on Alexandre Pétion see: Dubois, Laurent. The Aftershocks of History. New 
York: Picador, 2013.; Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed. Liautaud Éthéart’s play, La 
Fille de l’empereur (1860). focuses more directly on Célimène and Dessalines’s attempts 
to give her hand away in marriage. 
25 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 52 
26 Sourieau, Marie-Agnès. “Dessalines in Historical Drama and Haitian Contemporary 
Reality.” Small Axe 18 (September 2005): 29. 
27 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 1-2. 
28 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 8. 
29 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 15. 
30 Sourieau, “Dessalines in Historical Drama and Haitian Contemporary Reality,” 26. 
31Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 37. 
32 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 38. 
33 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 42-43. 
34 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 48. 
35 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, 53. 
36 Coicou, Massillon. Poésies nationales. (Paris : Imprimerie V. Goupy et Jourdan, 1892) 
99. 
37 For this section, I rely on the work of performance artist and anthropologist Gina 
Athena Ulysse, whose work projects a similar feminist re-imagining of Haiti in terms of 
women in her work Ulysse, Gina Athena. “VooDooDoll: What If Haïti Were a Woman.” 
Transition: An International Review 111 (2013): 104–112. 
98 
                                                                                                                                            
38Ghislain, Gouraige. Histoire de la littérature haïtienne. (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1973) 
74. 
39 Dédée Bazile was born in the area surrounding Cap Français, later named Défilée or 
“Défilée la folle,” was devoted to Dessalines, the fight for Haitian independence from the 
French and the end of colonial slavery. She is rumored to have gone insane after her 
children and brothers were massacred during French General Donatien Rochambeau’s 
genocidal campaign in the war for independence between 1802 and late 1803. There is 
also reasonable speculation by Colin (Joan) Dayan and Jana Evans Braziel that Défilée 
was the victim of sexual violence and trauma before and during the Haitian Revolution. 
Claude-Narcisse, Jasmine, and Pierre-Richard Narcisse. "Défilée, Dédée Bazile." 
Femmes d'Haïti. 2005. Web. 25 Nov. 2015. <http://www.haiticulture.ch/Defilee.html>. 
40 There are two notable contemporary feminist interventions into the historical silencing 
of Défilée. First, is Colin (Joan) Dayan’s Haiti, History, and the Gods where she offers a 
poignant discussion of the dismemberment of Dessalines in historical accounts by 
Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin, highlighting the importance of Défilée’s act of 
resistance against state violence. Dayan also provides a basis for Jana Evans Braziel’s 
work on Défilée as a female lieu de mémoire in Haitian history. See: Braziel, Jana Evans. 
“Re-Membering Defilee: Dedee Bazile as Revolutionary Lieu de Memoire.” Small Axe 
9.2 (2005): 57–85.; Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1998. 
41 Gouraige, Histoire de la littérature haïtienne, 75.  
42 Chancy, Myriam JA. Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women. New 
Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1997.13. 
43 Dorsainvil, J C. Manuel d'histoire d'Haïti. Port-au-Prince: Procure des Frères de 
l'Instruction Chrétienne, 1925. 188. 
44 Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women, 20. 
45 Written in 1936, it has been suggested by Raphael Hoermann and Alyssa Goldstien 
Sepinwall that many of the names of Haitian historical figures have been changed in 
order to critique the US occupation in Haiti from 1915-1934. Names like Stenio 
[Vincent] (president of Haiti) and Josef [Stalin] (Russian dictator) would have held 
99 
                                                                                                                                            
particular importance at the time the play was written. Hughes, Langston. The Emperor of 
Haiti. Alexandria: Alexander Street Press, 2002. 
46 Trouillot, Dessalines ou le sang du Pont Rouge, 11. 
47 Sourieau, “Dessalines in Historical Drama and Haitian Contemporary Reality,” 34. 
48 Placoly, Vincent. Dessalines, Ou, La Passion De L'indépendance. Ciudad de La 
Habana, Cuba: Casa de las Américas, 1983.; Métellus, Jean. Le Pont Rouge. Paris: 
Nouvelles du Sud, 1991. 
49 Sourieau, “Dessalines in Historical Drama and Haitian Contemporary Reality,” 30. 
50 Madness is a literary trope often employed by women writers, in the Caribbean 
especially, in order to provide a socio-critical perspective on systems of oppression. In 
Haitian literature, madness has been frequently used to critique state-sponsored violence 
and patriarchal institutions. For examples of Caribbean texts dealing with the trope of 
madness, see Amour, colère, folie by Marie Vieux-Chauvet and The Farming of Bones by 
Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo (Trinidad and 
Tobago), Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Saint Lucia), Juletane and Le Quimboiseur 
l’avait dit by Myriam Warner-Vieyra (Guadeloupe), and Te di la vida entera by Zoé 
Valdés (Cuba). 
51 Défilée is a figure often reified in Haitian fiction by women such as Edwidge Danticat 
(Krik, Krak, 1996) and Myriam JA Chancy (Spirit of Haiti, 2004). 
52 Coicou, L’Empereur Dessalines, iv-v. 
53 Ulysse, Gina Athena. Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-quake Chronicle. 
Middletown: (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) xxii. 
54 Johnson, Sara E. The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the 
Revolutionary Americas. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) 190. 
Chapter 4 
1 James, Marlon. A Brief History of Seven Killings. New York: Riverhead Books, 2014. 
2 For historical accounts, see: James, CLR. The Black Jacobins. New York: Vintage, 
1989.; Madiou, Thomas. Histoire d’Haïti, Tome II, 1799-1803.Port-au-Prince, Editions 
Henri Deschamps, 1989.; Rainsford, Marcus. An Historical Account of the Black Empire 
of Hayti. Eds. Paul Youngquist and Grégory Pierrot. Durham: Duke University Press, 
100 
                                                                                                                                            
2013. For literary representations, see: Cusset, Jean-Michel. 1802 ou Le dernier jour. 
Matoury: Editions Ibis Rouge, 2002.; Glissant, Édouard. Monsieur Toussaint. Trans. 
Michael Dash and Édouard Glissant. Boulder: Lynne Renner, 2005.; Hughes, Langston. 
Troubled Island. Ebook. (http://solomon.bldr.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-
bin/asp/philo/bldr/documentidx.pl?work_code=PL000791); James, CLR. Toussaint 
Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, A Play in Three 
Acts. Ed. Christian Høgsbjerg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.; Lamartine, 
Alphonse de. Toussaint Louverture. Exeter : University of Exeter Press, 1998.; Seghers, 
Anna. Trois femmes d’Haïti. Trans. Bruno Meur. Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, 2014.; 
Varin, Victor and Eugène Labiche. Traversin et Couverture, parodie de Toussaint 
Louverture en quatre actes mêlés de peu de vers et beaucoup de prose. Paris: Michel 
Lévy frères, 1850.; Walcott, Derek. The Haitian Trilogy. New York: Farrar, Straus, and 
Giroux, 2002.; Hughes, Langston.  Wordsworth, William. ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture.’ 
The Morning Post. 2 February, 1803.’ 
3 Walsh, John Patrick. Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé 
Césaire, and Narratives of Loyal Opposition. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 
2013) 30. 
4 According to VèVè A. Clark, one other play La Dernière nuit de Toussaint Louverture 
by Alcibiade Pommayrac (1877) was published before Ducasse’s Fort de Joux, Clark, 
Vèvè A. “Haiti’s Tragic Overture: (Mis)Representations of the Haitian Revolution in 
World Drama (1796-1975).” Representing the French Revolution: Literature, 
Historiography, and Art. Ed. James A. W Heffernan. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College  : 
University Press of New England, 1992. 255. However, this claim is misleading because 
– apart from Pommayrac’s play being ostensibly lost or never printed in full – the 
fragments that exist of La Dernière nuit have been referred to as “monologues in verse,” 
suggesting that it might have been more of a long-form poem. Lubin, Maurice Alcibiade. 
Jacmel et la poésie haïtienne. (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Imprimerie des Antilles, 1967) 44.   
5 Antoine Innocent would later dedicate his only novel Mimola, ou l’histoire d’une 
cassette (1906) to Ducasse who suddenly passed away in 1902 at the age of thirty years 
old. Innocent was also an actor, interpreting the role of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in both 
101 
                                                                                                                                            
Massillon Coicou’s L’Empereur Dessalines and Liautaud Éthéart’s La Fille de 
l’Empereur (1860) when it was re-staged at the turn of the century as well as Toussaint 
Louverture in Fort de Joux. 
6 Gouraige, Ghislain. Histoire de la littérature haïtienne. (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1973) 
98. 
7 Munro, Martin., and Elizabeth. Walcott-Hackshaw. Echoes of the Haitian Revolution, 
1804-2004. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2008.; Munro, 
Martin., and Elizabeth. Walcott-Hackshaw. Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its 
Cultural Aftershocks. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006.  
8 As both Deborah Jenson and John Patrick Walsh both emphasize the importance of 
language when referring to Toussaint Louverture’s 1802 arrest and deportation to France 
in order to not legitimize Napoleon Bonaparte and General Leclerc’s actions (Walsh 66) 
Accordingly, for this reason, I employ a lexicon of abduction, imprisonment, and torture 
to refer to the manner in which Toussaint Louverture found his way to captivity in the 
Fort de Joux. For a brief treatment of this episode see Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The 
Aftershocks of History. (37-38).  
9 Ardouin, B. Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti suivies de la vie du Général J.-M. Borgella. 
Paris: Dezobry et E. Magdeleine, 1853. 
10 Walsh, Free and French in the Caribbean, 66. 
11 Ducasse, Vendenesse. Fort de Joux, ou, Les derniers moments de Toussaint 
Louverture: drame historique en un acte. (Port-au-Prince, Haïit: Éditions Vétéran, 1957) 
1. 
12 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 7. 
13 By extensive references to Napoleon, I mean that the play refers to his exploits as the 
Premier Consul of France as well as numerous battles won under his regime. These 
references do not, however, present any reverence for Napoleon, nor do they seek to 
address anything more than the contemporaneous nature between events of world-
importance. Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 8. 
14 On the concept of “disavowal” in the context of the Haitian Revolution see: Fischer, 
Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of 
Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 
102 
                                                                                                                                            
15 While Ducasse does not mention any dates in his play, it is fair to imagine that if the 
“derniers moments de Toussaint Louverture” were to take on a temporal aspect, the play 
would be set in the days, or potentially the hours, leading up to his death on April 7th, 
1803. For a cogent and fascinating analysis of these writings see Deborah Jenson’s 
Beyond the Slave Narrative (page numbers needed).  
16 For a provocative analysis of the Dominican Republic in the late eighteenth and early 
nineteenth centuries, see: Sara E. Johnson Fear of French Negroes (pages) and Eller, 
Anne. “‘Awful Pirates’ and ‘Hordes of Jackals’: Santo Domingo/The Dominican 
Republic in Nineteenth-Century Historiography.” Small Axe 18.2 (July 2014): 80-94.  
17 By engaging in dialogue with Amyot, Mars is able to force him to confess that the Fort 
de Joux is, in fact, a prison rather than a Fortress. Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 26-27.  
18 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 36. 
19 Louverture, Toussaint. “Constitution de La Colonie Française de Saint-Domingue.” 17 
Aug. 1801. Web. 22 Mar. 2016. 1 
20 Many scholars have commented on and interpreted the 1801 constitution as a historical 
and a literary source, for example: Kaisary, Philip. “Hercules, the Hydra, and the 1801 
Constitution of Toussaint Louverture.” Atlantic Studies. 12.4 (2015): 393-411.; Gaffield, 
Julia. “Complexities of Imagining Haiti: A Study of National Constitutions, 1801-1807.” 
Journal of Social History 41.1 (2007): 81–103.;Walsh, John Patrick. Free and French in 
the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire and Narratives of Loyal Opposition. 
Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2013. ; Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity 
Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham: Duke 
University Press, 2004.   
21 Gaffield, “Complexities of Imagining Haiti,” 86-87. 
22 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 5. My emphasis. 
23 Kaisary “Hercules, the Hydra, and the 1801 Constitution of Toussaint Louverture,” 
403. 
24 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 6. 
25 In a law promulgated on May 21 2001, the French government via its former Minister 
of Justice Christiane Taubira recognized France’s role in the slave trade and colonial 
slavery declaring both as crimes against humanity. Taubira-Delannon, Christiane, 
Georges-Jacques Danton, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Lançons la liberté dans les 
103 
                                                                                                                                            
colonies  : Suivi de La France est un arbre vivant et de La traite et l’esclavage sont un 
crime contre l’humanité. Points, 2009. 
26 Kaisary “Hercules, the Hydra, and the 1801 Constitution of Toussaint Louverture,” 
401. 
27 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 8. 
28 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 8. 
29 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 8-9. 
30 See Kaisary, Philip. Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, 
Conservative Constraints. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 
31 Dessalines chose to return to the Taino name Ayiti or Haiti. There is little evidence to 
suggest that Toussaint would have proposed such a hemispheric reprisal given his 
writings about Saint-Domingue.  
32 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 16. 
33 For an in-depth discussion of manumission in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue see 
Garrigus, Before Haiti and Ghachem, The Haitian Revolution and the Old Regime.  
34 The French, namely Leclerc and Napoleon, by extension, believed that Toussaint had 
made a forged a trade alliance that granted Saint-Domingue economic independence from 
France as well as a large sum of gold. However false, Caffarelli would later make this the 
principle line of questioning during Toussaint’s captivity in the Fort de Joux because the 
gold, if recovered, would help Napoleon further finance his expedition to Saint-
Domingue and elsewhere. Rather desperate, Napoleon later abandons plans to retake 
Saint-Domingue and sells the Louisiana territory to the United States twenty-three days 
after Toussaint Louverture died on the French/Swiss border. See: 
(http://www.napoleon.org/fr/salle_lecture/articles/files/traitecessionlouisiane1803.asp) 
35 For a provocative and apt discussion of colonial and postcolonial epithets for Haiti, see 
Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the 
Revolutionary Americas 
36 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 17-18. My emphasis. 
37 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 17-18. My emphasis. 
38 I do not mean to suggest that Caffarelli was arguing for the départementalisation of 
Saint-Domingue, rather, he probably was evoking the metropole-colony relationship that 
existed between the Vieilles colonies where France oversaw governmental affairs 
104 
                                                                                                                                            
remotely. The French Over-Seas Departments were established in the Loi de 
départementalisation of March 19 1946, around fifty years prior to the writing of 
Ducasse’s play. 
39 The Battle of Vertières on 18 November, 1803 was the final stand of Jean-Jacques 
Dessalines and the Armée Indigène before Haitian Independence was declared on January 
1, 1804.  
40 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 23-24. 
41 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 36. 
42 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 35. 
43 Ducasse, Fort de Joux, 36. 
44 Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today. 29.1 (Spring 
2008): 108. My emphasis. 
45 Mompremier, Madsen. “Dessalines Ripping the White from the Flag.” Fowler Museum 
at UCLA. N.p., 1995. Web. 2 Mar. 2016. 
Chapter 5 
 
1 Ulysse, Gina Athena Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-quake Chronicle. 
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2015) xxii. 
2 Jonaissant, Jean, and Garraway, Doris L. “Toward New Paradigms in Caribbean 
Studies: The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on Our Literatures.” Tree of Liberty: 
Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Charlottesville: 
University of Virginia Press, 2008. 203–222.  
3 A copy of Nerhi ; ou le chef des Haytiens was recently recovered at the British National 
Archives in London by Tabitha McIntosh this past summer. She and Grégory Pierrot 
presented a preliminary analysis of the play at the 2015 Haitian Studies Association 
Meeting in Montéal, CA in October. McIntosh, Tabitha and Grégory Pierrot. 
“Henry/Nehri: Domestic Theater and International Stagecraft at the Royal Haitian 
Court.” Haitian Studies Association. Université de Montréal, Montréal, CA. 23 October 
2015. 
4 Daut, Marlene. Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian 
Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865. (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 
2015) 585. 
105 
                                                                                                                                            
5 Louis-Joseph Janvier was trained as a medical doctor in Paris, France. He was a 
significant contributor to late-nineteenth century Haitian thought and intellectual life 
penning works such as L’Égalité des races, a refutation of Arthur de Gobineau’s racist 
anthropological stance, and the historical text La République d’Haïti et ses visiteurs, 
(1840-1882). 
6Innocent, Antoine. Mimola, ou l’histoire d’une cassette. Google Books. Web. 13 Mar. 
2016. <https ;//books.google.com/books ?id=m64CAAAAYAAJ>.  
7 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Haiti’s Nightmare and the Lessons of History.” Haiti: 
Dangerous Crossroads. Ed. Deidre McFadyen. (Boston: South End Press, 1995) 20. 
107 
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