from Research in African Literatures Volume 35, Number 2 Excerpt from:Can't Stand Up for Falling Down: Haiti, Its Revolutions, and Twentieth-Century Negritudes
Martin Munro
University of the West Indies
Permission to CopyYou may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:
Copyright Clearance CenterFor other permissions, use our online reprint request form.
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923 FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com
ABSTRACT
The repercussions of the Haitian Revolution have been the subject of much historical, economic, and political scholarship. Less attention has, however, been paid to the cultural after-effects of Haiti's anticolonial victory. This essay calls for a more thorough critical re-evaluation of how the Revolution impacted cultures in the Caribbean, in the New World, and globally. As a contribution to this process, the essay revisits and re-interprets the work of the three central figures of the Negritude movement--Senghor, Damas, and Césaire--and considers how Haiti shaped their respective visions of "blackness." In tracing references to Haiti in Negritude poetry, prose, and theater, it argues that the Revolution is of only marginal importance to the African Senghor, while for the Caribbeans Damas and Césaire, the first black republic in the New World is a persistent, if often ambiguous and contradictory, point of reference.
In a well-known formulation, Antonio Benítez-Rojo describes the colonial plantation system as "the big bang of the Caribbean universe, whose slow explosion throughout modern history threw out billions and billions of cultural fragments in all directions--fragments of diverse kinds that, in their endless voyage, come together in an instant to form a dance step, a linguistic trope, the line of a poem, and afterward repel each other to re-form and pull apart once more, and so on" (55). If the plantation constituted an initial explosive moment in the Caribbean, it was certainly not the last "big bang" in the region. A seemingly endless series of historical upheavals--for instance, the Cuban Revolution, the Duvalier years in Haiti, departmentalization in the French territories, the 1960s independences in the former British colonies--have subsequently "thrown out" further cultural "fragments" across the Caribbean and beyond, into what Édouard Glissant calls the "chaos-monde" 'chaos world,' the "choc actuel de tant de cultures qui s'embrasent, se repoussent, disparaissent, subsistent, s'endorment ou se transforment, lentement ou à vitesse foudroyante" 'the current clash of so many cultures which flare up, repel each other, disappear, subsist, die, or transform each other, slowly, or at lightning speed' (Traité du Tout-Monde 22).
IU Press Journals
Home PageMore about Research in African Literatures
Tables of
ContentsLibrary
RecommendationAdvance
InformationCopyright
Clearance