Miami Peniel Church of the Nazarene-Eglise du Nazareen Peniel, Reverend Delanot Pierre, Pastor, (December 11, 1945, Ennery, Haiti — April 20, 2013, Miami, Florida). Rest in Peace.

The widow of the unfortunate Toussaint has just landed upon our continent. Her account of her own and her husband’s sufferings, from Bonaparte’s tyranny, would be incredible, were they not already equaled by the Corsican’s former atrocities, and those of his accomplices. Her mutilated limbs and numerous wounds, are, besides, visible proofs of the racks and other instruments of torture from which she has suffered in the dungeons of free, enlightened, and civilized France, and under which, little doubt remains that General Toussaint expired.

From the moment Le Clerc, by perfidy and breach of treaties, got her husband and herself into his possession, they were loaded with chains, and during their whole passage to France, they continued in irons, with hardly food enough to support life. At their landing in Bourdeaux, they were separated, though shut in the same prison. What happened since to her husband she does not know, nor is she yet certain whether he has perished, as the French papers have published, in a dungeon at Besançon; or whether, with a mutilated body, he continues to breath the pestilential air of French gaols, exposed to the cruelties of, and enduring that refinement in torment which French ingenuity so ably invents, and of which Corsican barbarity so willingly makes use…

“An Account of the Wife of Toussaint L’Ouverture,” The Christian Observer(1804)

Image taken from Jean Ledan fils, “La saga de Mme Louverture,” Le Nouvelliste (May 25, 2012)

With American influence becoming so strong in Haiti through the United States permanent control and administration of customs, finances, etc., followed, as it naturally would be, by American investment in the island and increased trading between the two countries, it was natural that the National Bank, heretofore almost entirely in Europe, should pass into full American ownership. Being already interested in a small degree in the institution, The National City Bank with full faith in the future development of Haiti, contemplates acquiring the entire business of the bank, and, while its independent organization would continue, the bank’s affairs would be directed from New York instead of from Paris. This change will bring to the merchants of Haiti a full City Bank Service, and more adequate and efficient facilities to our merchants trading with the republic.

John H. Allen, “American Co-Operation Assures a Better Era for Haiti,” The Americas (May 1920)

To know the reasons for the present political situation in Haiti, to understand why the United States landed and has for five years maintained military forces in that country, why some three thousand Haitian men, women, and children have been shot down by American rifles and machine guns, it is necessary, among other things, to know that the National City Bank of New York is very much interested in Haiti. It is necessary to know that the National City Bank controls the National Bank of Haiti and is the depository for all of the Haitian national funds that are being collected by American officials, and that Mr. R. L. Farnham, vice-president of the National City Bank, is virtually the representative of the State Department in matters relating to the island republic.

James Weldon Johnson, Self-Determining Haiti (1920)

Citigroup’s history in Haiti is remembered as both among the most spectacular episodes of U.S. dollar diplomacy in the Caribbean and as an egregious example of officials in Washington working at the behest of Wall Street. It’s also a story marked by military intervention, violations of national sovereignty and the deaths of thousands.

“Where does Haiti fit in Citigroup’s Corporate History?” Bloomberg (June 2012)

Image: Cover of Le Matin (Port-au-Prince, Haiti), February 26, 1927: Source: Digital Library of the Caribbean.

The planters talked over their billiards and their wine, and the longer they played and the more they drank the more they talked. They said things not intended for slave ears. The wine loosened their tongues and blurred their intellects.

Christophe listened with amazement and then coolly digested what they said; and within the short tropic twilight told what had been said, with his disgusted reflections to Marie-Louise. It was as new to her as to Christophe. First it amazed her as it had her lover. Then she cogitated upon it. Then it was that Christophe became teacher.

What he had heard the planters say was that Saint Domingue was a powder barrel and liable to blow up at any time. There were, they said, twenty thousand planters with five hundred thousand black slaves, and between them were twenty-four thousand people neither white or black, and the three classes were opposed to each other. If the slaves ever found out the power of numbers, it would be death to the whites; also, if the jealousy of the mulattoes increased to the boiling point, so they could join the blacks, the boiling would become fiercer. But they were so jealous that they would not unite.

Marie-Louise listened and thought as she listened to Christophe.

“There may be a revolution,” she mused. “A black kingdom may take the place of the white one.”

Charles E. Waterman, Carib Queens (1935) [As transcribed by Bob Corbett]

Image: Aaron P. Garcia, Marie-Louise Christophe, Milot, Haiti, 2008.

When the slaves and free coloureds of Saint Domingue rebelled in the autumn of 17791, Jamaican society faced the greatest challenge of its history. The dramatic spectacle of violent self­liberation was acted out almost before the eyes of its blacks and mulattoes, while the ruling white elite experienced a dilemma that seemed to oppose its prosperity to its survival.

David Geggus, “Jamaica and the Saint Domingue Slave Revolt, 1791-1793,” The Americas 38 (October 1981): {pdf}

Image: Abraham Raimbach, “Leonard Parkinson, a captain of the Maroons,” B. Edwards, The Proceedings of the Governor and Assembly of Jamaica, in Regard to the Maroon Negroes… to which is prefixed an Introductory Account… of the Maroons (1796). Source: NYPL Digital Gallery. Also see: Nova Scotia Archives.

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías (28 July 1954 – 5 March 2013).

*video via @dominique_e_ + @djaspora

If any good reason exists why we should persevere longer in withholding our recognition of the independence and sovereignty of Haiti and Liberia, I am unable to discern it. Unwilling, however, to inaugurate a novel policy in regard to them without the approbation of Congress, I submit to your consideration the expediency of an appropriation for maintaining a Chargé d’Affaires near each of these states. It does not admit of doubt that important commercial advantages might be secured by favorable treaties with them.

Abraham Lincoln (1871) quoted in Charles H. Wesley, “The Struggle for the Recognition of Haiti and Liberia as Independent Republics,” Journal of Negro History (October 1917)

Image: “The shield and emblem of Liberia as they might be.” From Sir Harry Johnston’s Liberia (1906). Source: New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

A visualisation of the response to the earthquake by the OpenStreetMap community. Within 12 hours the white flashes indicate edits to the map (generally by tracing satellite/aerial photography).

Over the following days a large number of additions to the map are made with many roads (green primary, red secondary) added. Also many other features were added such as the blue glowing refugee camps that emerge.

A lot of these edits were made possible by a number of satellite and aerial imagery passes in the days after the quake, that were release to the public for tracing and analysis.

Neg Maron, Champ de Mars, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 4th, 2012. Credit: Leonard Doyle, IOM.

Easily the most hyped Haiti-related book to come out in the past year was Purpose: An Immigrant Story (It Books), the memoir of rapper-turned-presidential-candidate Wyclef Jean. They say Purpose is actually not that bad, especially if you’re interested in either Clef’s take on the dissolution of the Fugees or his embittered account of his agonized history with Lauryn Hill. But it offers little on his controversial charity efforts or on his political aspirations, though perhaps these issues will be addressed in one of the proposed seven tomes Wyclef plans on writing.  Regardless, the books that interested us in 2012 were not over-marketed and vapid celebrity tell-alls but politically and intellectually engaged tracts – often published by smaller, lesser-known presses, and often overlooked by the mainstream.

One such book, Terre de femmes: 150 ans de poésie féminine en Haïti (Bruno Doucey) we’ve written of before (and it was actually published in 2010). But we were so taken by this strikingly designed volume that we feel compelled to mention it again. Terre de femmes contains poetry from thirty-five Haitian women writers, from early twentieth-century figures Ida Flaubert and Emmeline Carriès Lemaire to contemporary writers Kettly Mars and Elvire Maurouard, many of whom we were introduced to for the first time. The anthology boasts a spectrum of tone, perspective, and style: romantic verse sits alongside odes to Simon Bolivar and invocations of Toussaint Louverture. Terre de femmes is a welcome revelation, as were the contents of two other excellent collections compiling writing by and about Caribbean women. Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2010 (Editorial Campaña), edited by Myrna E. Nieves-Colón, is a bilingual compendium that grew out of the Boricua College Winter Poetry Series, while Ifeona Fulani’s pioneering Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women, and Music (University of the West Indies Press) gathers essays on Rhianna, Celia Cruz, Grace Jones, Louise Bennett, and, as it turns out, the incomparable Lauryn Hill.

Problems of distribution and translation (or, less generously, questions of disinterest and Anglophone insularity and provincialism), have kept English-language readers in the dark concerning many of the writers published in Terre de femmes. Similar problems plague our knowledge of books by publishers based in Haiti despite their deep and growing lists. Since May 2011, the Petionville consultancy firm C3 Group has had an admirable output of monographs published under the imprint Editions C3Group. Their first title, 100% Préval, is a wide-ranging assessment of the presidency of Rene Préval that brings together a cross section of Haitian politicians and intellectuals. They have published seven books since including Les 100 premiers jours de Martelly on “Martellisme” and the early days of the Martelly presidency as well as a number of regional studies of Haitian economy and politics. Radical? Probably not. But they are, nonetheless, important interventions and their latest monograph attacks the question of color and racism in Haitian society. Titled La vie et ses couleurs and edited by Lionnel Trouillot it contains contributions in Kreyol and French by writers including Jean-Euphèle Milcé, Emelie Prophète, Evelyne Trouillot, Gary Victor, and Rodney St-Éloi, the latter also the publisher of the fantastic Montreal-based press Mémoire d’encrier.

Having already published the late geographer Georges Anglade’s Le secret du dynamisme littéraire haïtien and Jean Casimir’s Haïti et ses élites. L’interminable dialogue de sourds, among other academic texts, Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti have over the past year issued Robenson Belunet’s important addition to studies of the first US Occupation, La France face à l’occupation américaine d’Haïti (1915-1934), as well as Marie Redon’s ambitious comparative study of frontiers and islands, Des îles en partage: Haïti, République dominicaine, Saint-Martin, Timor Editions, published in collaboration with Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Also published collaboratively, this time with Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, is the collection Haïti, réinventer l’avenir. Edited by Jean-Daniel Rainhorn, Haïti, réinventer l’avenir grew out of a conference in Geneva in January 2011 on Haiti’s reconstruction and is billed as a “trialogue” between more than two-dozen contributors drawn from Haitian civil society, the Haitian diaspora, and the international community. Haïti, réinventer l’avenir should be read alongside a similar volume, Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Quake (Stylus/Kumarian), edited by anthropologist Mark Schuller and NACLA editor Pablo Morales.

Editions de l’Université d’Etat d’Haïti also published a path-breaking collection of Caribbean economic history, Histoire économique de la Caraibe (1880 – 1950), edited by scholars Guy Pierre, Gustie Gaillard-Pourchet, and Nathalie Lamaute-Brisson. Focusing largely on the changing fortunes of the sugar industry and the role of banking, debt, and monetary policy in the region’s economic organization and development, Histoire économique de la Caraibe contains contributions from a fantastic set of Caribbean historians including César Ayalá, Alain Buffon, Roberto Cassá, Rebeca Gómez Betancourt, Leslie F. Manigat, Rita Pemberton, Inés Roldan de Montaud, and Oscar Zanetti. Other works of a historical bent published in the past year include Malick W. Gechem’s study of self-fashioning and negotiation within the colonial laws of Saint-Domingue, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge), and a special issue of the Radical History Review, titled Haitian Lives/Global Perspective and edited by historians Amy Chazkel, Melina Pappademos, and Karen Sotiropoulos. The issue includes a micro-history of plantation life in Saint-Domingue, an analysis of Toussaint’s L’Ouverture’s 1801 constitution, an account of the National City Bank in Haiti, and histories of both Guantanamo and Miami’s Krome Detention Center. Unfortunately, the Radical History Review is only available to paid subscribers. Sara E. Johnson’s Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (California) takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of how African people within the greater Caribbean responded to the Haitian Revolution while in Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Chicago), Deborah Jenson examines the texts written by Haitians themselves. Jenson examines the political tracts penned by revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines as well as Saint-Domingue’s popular, anonymously written Creole poetry.

The most famous account of the Haitian Revolution is, of course, CLR James’s 1938 history The Black Jacobins. But before he composed his dramatic history of revolution, James rendered the revolution as historical drama. His play was written in 1934, staged in 1936 at London’s Westminister Theatre – with Paul Robeson starring – and lost until a draft was rediscovered in 2005 by historian Christian Høgsbjerg, who unearthed it during his doctoral research. Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History; A Play in Three Acts has been edited by Høgsbjerg and published by Duke. It comes as the first publication of a new series, The CLR James Archives, edited by Robert A. Hill, a scholar best known for his work on the Marcus Garvey and Universal Improvement Association Papers Project. The aim of the series is to recover and reproduce James’s work, and work on James, for a contemporary audience. In another act of recovery, James’s analysis of the economic and political nature of the mid-century Soviet state have been compiled by Scott McLemee as The Dialectics of State Capitalism: Writings on Marxist Theory, 1940-1956 and is due out from Haymarket Press.

The state is at the center of a number of recent monographs that have examined questions of democracy, dictatorship and neo-colonialism in contemporary Haiti. Justin Podur’s Haiti’s New Dictatorship: The Coup, The Earthquake and the UN Occupation (Pluto) scrutinizes the ways in which the international community has choked Haiti’s sovereignty since the 2004 coup while promoting a supposedly benign international occupation of the country. Jeb Sprague’s thoroughly-researched Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti (Monthly Review) examines the growth of right-wing paramilitaries and their role, supported by money and political muscle from the United States and the Dominican Republic, in subverting Haitian grassroots democratic movements. In the 2005 book Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (Fernwood), Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton, shed light on Great White North’s role in the overthrow of democracy in the Black Republic; a section of Yves Engler’s latest, The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy (Fernwood) pillories Canada’s post-earthquake callousness.

Finally, Revue Noire, the Paris-based journal of Black art, has published The Room of Mario Benjamin, the first monograph on the Port-au-Prince based abstract painter. And if you aren’t able to travel to Los Angeles to see the well regarded exhibit In Extremis: Death and Life in 21^st-Century Haitian Art at UCLA’s Fowler Museum its catalogue, edited by Donald Cosentino, will be published by the University of Washington Press. The exhibit displayed works by artists from Jean-Michel Basquiat to the famous found-object sculptors of Port-au-Prince’s Grand Rue; the catalogue contains essays from Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Edwidge Danticat, Leah Gordon, Claudine Michel, Jean Claude Saintilus, and others.

All told, there’s a depth and richness to these publications that is still missing from Haiti’s coverage and representation in the mainstream press. Support these endeavors. Buy the books.

All best for the new year.

The Public Archive <editor@thepublicarchive.com>

Image: Cédric Audebert, Le marquage architectural et culturel de Little Haiti et la Librairie Mapou. Source: Cédric Audebert, « Les stratégies spatiales de la population haïtienne à Miami », EchoGéo (2007).

Visit Librairie Mapou at 5919 Northeast 2nd Avenue, Miami, Florida, USA 33137 [Map] or buy books about Haiti online at the Haitian Book Center.