Memwa Se Paswa

Memory, Diaspora, and the Haitian Religious Subject

Unfortunately, the condition of the colonies is not known in France. We have a false idea of the Negro…We have in Europe a false idea of the country in which we fight and the men we fight against - Leclerc to Bonaparte, 1802

Upon his arrest, Louverture declared “in overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous, and they are deep”.  Louverture’s warning came to bold fruition in the events that followed the general’s eventual death in a cold, damp jail cell at Fort-de-Joux. Descriptions of the events leading up to and following the Haitian revolution are a vast field of social, political, and cultural remembrances and performances of forgetting. On what inspired the Haitian revolution, Stuart Hall suggests, 

“And yet in actual accounts of the revolution that we have, one of the most difficult, one of the trickiest historical passages to negotiate is precisely how much, in the spark of various things that went into the making of the Haitian revolution, can be attributed on the one hand to the ruptures sweeping out in the wake of the French Revolution, on the one hand, and on the other hand to the long experience of a severe and brutal regime on the plantations themselves, what you might call the revolutionary school of life itself” (1995, 3).

Slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue was particularly cruel. On the treatment of enslaved black people on the island, Pompée Valentin Vastey, secretary to Henri Christophe, wrote,

“Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to consume faeces [sic]? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man eating-dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?” (Johnson 2012, 20)

Comparing the islands that make up the West Indies, Waters point out three contemporary points of comparison “that shape Caribbean identity”: the legacies of European colonialism, the legacies of slavery, and the domination of the island economies and cultures in recent times by the United States (1999, 19).

A number of paintings of the Haitian revolution portray the unfurling of events of the Haitian revolution as the intervention of Divine Providence. “Divine Providence” is often depicted as a benevolent white entity.  The presence of the Christianity, in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, is strong in Haitian memory. The induction of Code Noir, a set of 

guidelines pertaining to religious and legislative conduct, in 1685 insured Catholicism’s dominant presence in the French colonies. 

Its guidelines provided for the instruction of enslaved Saint-Dominguans in the Catholic faith tradition, permeating Saint-Domingue culture and politics from plantations to the legislature. At the same time, it prohibited the “public exercise” of religions other than la catholique, apostolique et romaine. Catholicism’s presence in Haitian consciousness also entails acts of accord between revolutionaries and Catholic clerics. Father Philemon, a Jesuit priest, was “accused and convicted of having supported the blacks in revolt and having corresponded with their chiefs, as well as the Spanish” (Thibau 1989, 319). However benevolent the Roman Catholic Church’s presence in Saint Domingue/Haiti may have been, Haitians adopted aspects of the faith that help expand discourses on the liberatory aspects of religion. For example, Jean Bertrand-Aristide, a former Catholic priest and eventual president of Haiti, employed principles of liberation theology into his political work. 

No discussion of Haiti can take place without a discussion on Vodou. It is believed that the slave insurrection on Saint Domingue began as a massive Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman. The exact events that occurred at Bois Caïman are lost to history. Still, what is believed to have happened rings heavily in the formation of the modern Haitian nation.  From the Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman to Toussaint Louverture’s ascension, Haitian belongings are embedded in a multilayered network of histories and religious aesthetics. These histories traverse alongside Haitian migrants. In studies of immigrant religion in the United States, scholars recognize the facilitation of one’s adaptation into the host society and the preservation of ethnicity as functions of religion (Chen 2008, 5).

However, not all ethnic traditions will be preserved (Chen 2008, 5). For example, in the case of Haitian Mormons, although spiritual work is part and parcel of Haiti’s religious legacy, it is generally frowned upon once one has converted. Individuals develop their religious identity in two stages: recruitment and conversion. (Leatham, 1997, 295). Karl Morrison proposes three conceptualizations of conversion: conversion in name, conversion as (no)thing, and conversion as a metaphor (1992, 2). As a metaphor, conversion details the “mastering the group’s religious culture” (Leatham, 1997, 295).  As one masters the religious culture, culture converges with emotion and practice. 

“The effects of religious activities such as prayer, rituals, miracles, and mystical experiences build up over a lifetime, not only increasing confidence in the truth of a religion, but strengthening emotional ties to a specific bundle of religious culture” (Stark, Finke 123)

Karen Richman surveys a dialogue between conversion and the retention of folk religion, and culture among Haitian Protestants in “A More Powerful Sorcerer: Conversion, Capital, and Haitian Transnational Migration.” Conversion, Richman writes, is believed to promote “rhetoric and a set of behaviors for mastering a model of individual, social, and economic success in the United States” (2008, 4). At the same time, Haitian converts to Protestantism maintain strong ties to a number of folk beliefs and practices. Richman’s project challenges predominant attitudes regarding the function of Protestantism in severing traditional religious identities. Describing Haitian religion in Miami, Terry Rey notes,

The main draw is the mass. Men and women, the elderly and the youth, families and singles, all crowd inside the church. Eventually they are swaying to music driven by Vodou drums that infuse the congregation with African rhythms, joyfully singing hymns of praise in French and Haitian Creole. The homily is bilingual, primarily in Creole, but also in English for the second-generation youth who prefer it (2013, 2). 

Here, one sees the articulation of memory through religious practice. 

Catholicism isn’t the only faith practice where Haitians incorporate a sense of “Haitianess.” In “Pentecostalism in Translation: Religion and the Production of Community in the Haitian Diaspora,” Paul Brodwin writes that, “migrants memorialize the Haitian homeland and articulate the collective sentiments of loss through the idiom of Pentecostal theology and worship styles.” At the same time, as Brodwin illustrates, the social and cultural norms embodied in Pentecostalism can represent a rupture in modernity and histories related to the rise of the modern. “Believers who have ‘left the world’ in theological terms,” Brodwin writes, “transcend their previous selves, in particular, their poverty and illiteracy” (2003, 87).