Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [38]
It would take six decades for the United States to acknowledge Haiti’s independence. During that time, Haiti continued to be considered as a possible penal colony for the United States or as a place (à la Liberia) where freed blacks could be repatriated. By the time Abraham Lincoln recognized Haiti’s independence in 1862, America was already at war with itself over the issue of slavery. Burdened by its postindependence isolation and the hundred million francs in payment it was forced to give France for official recognition—an amount estimated to be worth more than twenty-two billion U.S. dollars today, which some Haitians, including the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, have insisted should be repaid—Haiti began its perilous slide toward turmoil and dependency, resulting in a nineteen-year U.S. occupation and three subsequent interventions in the past hundred years.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson predicts what might happen to the U.S. political system in a worstcase scenario. But his words turned out to be a more accurate prophecy for America’s plundered neighbor. “The spirit of the times . . . will alter,” Jefferson wrote. “Our rulers will become corrupt. . . . The shackles . . . which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of war will remain on long, will be made heavier and heavier.”
Perhaps, had it been given a fair chance at its beginning, Haiti might have flourished and prospered. If that had been the case, Haiti might have celebrated the bicentennial of its independence with fewer shackles. Instead, in January 2004, Haiti observed the two-hundredth anniversary of its independence from France in the midst of a national revolt. In the Haitian capital and other cities throughout the country, pro- and antigovernment demonstrators clashed. Members of a disbanded army declared war on a young and inexperienced police force. Mobs of angry young men, some called chimè (chimeras) by their countrymen and others ironically echoing Thomas Jefferson and calling themselves lame kanibal, the cannibal army, battled one another to determine whether the then Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide—worshipped by chimeras and reviled by the cannibal army—would remain in office or be overthrown.
A few weeks later, Aristide departed in the early hours of a Sunday morning. By his account, he was kidnapped from his residence in Port-au-Prince and put on an unmarked U.S. jet, which took him to the Central African Republic, where he was practically held prisoner for several weeks. By other accounts, he went willingly, even signing a letter of resignation in Haitian Creole. What remains uncontested is that as he began his life in exile, Aristide recited for the international press the same words that Toussaint L’Ouverture uttered on his way to mortal exile in France: “In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty. . . . It will shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many.”
Haitians in and outside of Haiti were not surprised that, in Haiti’s bicentennial year, Aristide chose to link his exit with such a powerful echo from the past. After all, there has never been a more evocative moment in Haiti’s history—even though neglected by the world—than the triumphant outcome of the revolution that L’Ouverture and others had lived and died for exactly two hundred years earlier. Though Haiti’s transition from slavery to free state was far from seamless, many Haitians, myself included,