In my estimation, the beauty that lies in existentialist thought manifests itself as a truthful, bare encounter with reality, and with it, an appraisal—in whatever form it comes—of the condition of human existence. For this reason, I come to this review essay bearing, as it were, the full weight of my Caribbeanity, which my Jamaicanness centrally forms but does not exhaust. Indeed, how could it, when the colonial (and subsequent postcolonial) history of the Caribbean has always been one of a collective tailoring—a suturing of seemingly scattered pieces of land, in order to make a collective whole, for either the ends of collective regress or collective progress?
It is precisely from this position of the Caribbean subject that I critically write about and think alongside Jean Casimir in his vibrantly history-charting, The Haitians: A Decolonial History, which is the recent winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought. Against this backdrop, one cannot help but cite, and perhaps, if such a space can exist here, grieve, the current, ongoing circumstances of Haiti—its ever-mounting social and political upheavals. Here are some facts on the ground, against which we may wrestle:
- 87% of Haitians are living in poverty, with 30% living in abject poverty.
- Conservatively, roughly 200,000 Haitians are displaced due to gang violence and other social ills.
- According to a UN report (2023), 4.9 million Haitians are experiencing food insecurity.
- Only two percent of children complete high school in Haiti.
I lay these facts bare not to caricature Haiti, as is fashionable in Euro-American discourses, where, in the white imaginary, Haiti lives on as only a cautionary metaphor—a foreshadowing—that Haitians will forever rest in the penumbra of ruin and rue their very existence. The adage that too easily rolls off the lips of many neocolonialists, where Haiti is branded often as “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” is no accidental coinage but a result of what I would call discursive assassination. Hence, I write not in but profoundly against that colonial vein of thought that can only view Haiti as an emblem for black failure ever since 1804.
On the other hand, if one were to take seriously responsibility for reality, as a phenomenological imperative, it must mean that engaging Casimir’s decolonial history of Haiti requires taking stock of its ongoing neocolonial histories of the present in order to get to decolonial histories of the future. For these reasons, the aforementioned statistical reality is not a result of Haitian malfeasance, as the Euromodern narratives would announce at every globalist microphone, but rather a result of continued Haitian violation, victimization, and vilification. It is worth quoting Casimir at length, in his prefatory notes:
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Haitian population confronts major difficulties in trying to occupy the little world in which they love to their satisfaction. It has always been this way. This population’s supposed poverty, and the low levels of what the Western world calls education, are not the cause of this. The greatest success it has accomplished—liberation from slavery, and independence—didn’t depend on this education, or on the values and principles of the Western world. According to this world’s standards, it comprised at the time—and still comprises—the poorest and most abject human group in the universe. But despite this rather unflattering assessment, in the past and in the present, the circumstances imposed on the Haitian people have never overcome their will to live and to continue to struggle against the winds and the tides to defend their choices. (2020: xviii)
Therefore, The Haitians offers a searing reckoning of Haiti’s past and present, with a sure, sedimented pathway for a renewed, decolonial futurity. What makes the text exceptional is its historicizing of its revolutionary subjects. Rather than beginning with the lazy, a priori designation of “slave” or even, in its more enlightened formulation of “enslaved,” Casimir begins not in the European tongue, but in linguistic ontology of the African subject: bossale. Grammar matters. This nomenclature is critical in understanding the epistemologies of bondage and freedom. On the bossale, Casimir writes:
The past of the bossales—the African-born enslaved who were the majority in Saint-Domingue—is usually overlooked… They were not born into slavery, and they did not live as slaves. They were enslaved through intense torture, through revolting abuse and forms of humiliation that are a disgrace to humanity. How can we explain the blindness on the part of all chroniclers, both French and Haitian, who conceive of the history of the country as starting with slaves, rather than with captives? Once they were captured, the captives had to be converted into slaves, and this transformation was not instantaneous. (2020: 8–9)
This is an important turn in the historicizing of enslavement, one that pays homage to African indigeneity and restores agency to black “captives” who were racialized for the throes of enslavement. Certainly, the move is not to refute the slavery of blacks but to resuscitate African agential capacity in the midst of slave-making, both as forms of resistance and a praxis of humanist retrieval. Casimir’s historical hermeneutics raises contemporary questions about ongoing discourses on black carceral subjectivities.
Today, one could argue that the mass incarceration of blacks operates as a re-enactment of the old slavocratic order. Casimir’s historical treatment of the enslaved captives as “prisoners,” and the planters as “master-jailer” (318). Therefore, in examining Haiti’s decolonial history, Casimir spotlights the continuity of old colonial practices and centralizes the dialectic of capture as a foundation for the emergence of Western modernity. The capture of Haiti was both a question of histography, geography, and physiognomy—of the past, the land, and the body. Therefore, the relation between the colonial as being predicated on captive imaginaries delimits the ontological view from which to fully view Haitian revolutionary praxis.
Take, for instance, Casimir’s argument that “[a]s long as histography imprisons itself in the paradigm of European modernity, it validates the idea that the colonized are savages… Historical sociology is not a way of reading a specific history on the basis of accepted sociological theories. It is not about applying these theories to the specific historiography of the colonized country. The unit of analysis in all sociology remains the social relation, the link between groups and their members situated in a specific place and time” (24). Part and parcel of Casimir’s decolonizing project, as it orbits the principal matter of Haitian civilizational progress, is an unambiguous reinvention of the very indexes and heuristics within which to read and interpret the historical and sociological facts themselves. Put another way, Casimir, true to the method of Fanonian psychoanalysis, diagnoses both social illiteracy and historical mendacity as being constitutive factors of colonial modernity. The colonial cost that is leveled against Haiti is a methodological pauperism that impoverishes modern imaginaries.
As such, there is a decolonizing of method in The Haitians in order to arrive at the creative, generative capacity of the Haitian people to world-make and self-create. And so, it is not tautological to restate that this decolonial praxis of self-making made the Revolution revolutionary, in radically reinventing a new grammar of being (and of being black). This latter move is important because such a grammar of blackness, though novel to the New World, already formed the epistemic architecture of the bossales’ existence—a free life prior to captivity.
Therefore, the question of sovereignty, the relation between the people and the state, strikes at the heart of the text. Yet that popular sovereignty becomes negotiated between itself and French colonization, which led to what Casimir calls a “rupture”—a suspension of the people’s political and civil rights (35). Nonetheless, every lever of the colonial machinery elicited an ongoing anti-colonial response, a collective contestation of colonial regimes of power. Such contests demonstrate a clear instance of fashioning an alternative, decolonial symbolic universe.
Nevertheless, the longitudinal effects of French colonization led to a calcified manifestation of Haitian oligarchs, both colonial (property-owners) and creole (cultivators), who paved the way for colonialism within Haiti following the assassination of Haitian revolutionary figurehead, Dessalines. Bureaucratization of the nation took root, in all its manifold administrative specificities, and devolved into colonial officialdom, overrepresented as though it were the sovereign state itself.
The hubris of the colonial administration ceded way to a totalizing impulse that governed daily life. This corresponding social structuration shaped a society bifurcated between the Haitian oligarchy (the moneyed, urban minorities) and the genuine sources of Haitian sovereignty (the black, poor agro-laborers), a bifurcation whose tension in turn constitutes the state of Haiti (388). In guiding us through the lengthy sociological politics in Haitian state-making, from its internal plantocratic schemas to its external American colonists, Casimir impresses on the reader the deep history of Haitian colonialism beyond vague gestures and one-dimensional vignettes of Saint-Dominque’s well-known racial hierarchies and system of enslavement.
It is precisely these rich and nuanced portraits of imageries and contradictions that make the telling, or retelling, of Haiti’s history an act of decolonial histography. In the end, Casimir’s point is simple as it is consistent: though the colonial fabric of thought laced every measure of the island, Haitian sovereignty unceasingly resisted in what the author calls a wave of “counterthought, which in Haiti has never tired of expressing itself in its own language” (99). This counterthought is one of self-invention, worldmaking, and the struggle for an alternative social order through acts of decolonial praxis. Thus, the creolizing of Haiti did not end in its linguistic namesake, Kreyòl, but sought to embody its people as well as its revolutionary means, where the dialectical clash of localized acts of resistance against colonial captivity meant the expression of Haitian sovereignty, though limited it may be. “For this very reason,” Casimir reminds us, “resistance was inseparable from compromise” (318).
As such, a dialectical tension emerges within the pressurized parameters of a captive, colonial milieu where explosive yet prolonged acts of freedom were made intelligible and expressible. It is inside this matrix of slavocratic action and captive reaction “that the autogenesis of the Creole began” (293). Creolization defies the purities that inhere in the colonial complex. It is a moment of, and movement towards, charting new social geographies of belonging. That trajectory has not always been linear, as Haitian oligarchic interests stand in opposition to the core teleological imperative of Haitian popular sovereignty, what Casimir names “tout moun se moun—that is, that we are all equal before the law. It [tout moun se moun] converted itself into a people and expressed its will to live, so that none of its children would experience the personal dependency that typified modern colonial relations” (389).
This decolonial will-to-live that overcame a colonial will-to-die becomes a refusal, a negation of the colonial death project. In so doing, Haitians reinvented the grammar of being, by excavating subaltern knowledges from below. “Haitians faced a nineteenth-century Western world in the midst of expanding and consolidating its totalizing vision of the universe. In response, they built themselves” (347). In reconstructing Haitianness specifically and blackness more broadly against a colonial project of existential erasure, Haitians created a new, alternative social order, one where there is a resuscitation of the conditions of possibility for black survival and flourishing.
And so, against this backdrop, we return to the question with which we began: What does Casimir’s decolonial re-historicizing of Haiti presage for how we grapple with the nation’s present conditions? As I write, in light of my Caribbeanity, and with reference to my Jamaicanness, I read the pages of my island’s premier newspaper, the Jamaica Gleaner, where a headline reads: “Latest group of Haitians [refugees] being returned, lawyer warns Jamaica ‘breaking’ int’l law.” It seems to me Haiti may well have to anoint itself its own national and hemispheric savior as it once did 219 years ago. Jamaica and the other independent Caribbean states (including, most notoriously, the Dominican Republic) have not yet answered the call of their sister nation.
Nevertheless, the conditions of possibility for Haiti are, paradoxically, a denial of the conditions of possibility. It is against a colonial empire of destruction that a decolonial praxis of deconstruction, and later, reconstruction, is born. In a word, Haiti has been here before—on the threshold of historical fault lines. At that time, it defied the Euromodern imagination of the 18th and 19th centuries; Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously argued that “[t]he Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened” (73). In the 21st century, it may well have to do so again.
Casimir’s The Haitians provides a decolonial justificatory treatise for precisely this remaking of new histories, and with them, livable futures and an open category of the human being. It was Frantz Fanon who wrote, “let us reexamine the question of man” (237). Casimir’s opus plunges into that debate with a distinctly Haitian revolutionary inflection that makes for a very fitting recipient of Frantz Fanon Award. In the final analysis, The Haitians towers as a reconstructed roadmap for another decolonial revolutionary event, beyond that of 1804.
Derefe Kimarley Chevannes
Derefe Kimarley Chevannes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Memphis, who specializes in Africana Political Theory. Chevannes’ research interests center on issues of black liberation and black radical thought in the modern world. He writes at the intersection of Political Theory, Africana Studies, Caribbean Studies, and Disability Studies.
