Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [157]
According to the principles of Vodou, which has remained the actual religion of Haiti from Toussaint's time into ours (though it was not officially recognized until the 1990s, under the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide), no one ever really dies. The death of the body is understood as a transition of state. In contrast to the Judeo-Christian scheme of things, the souls of the Haitian dead do not depart to any distant afterworld, but remain in invisible but close proximity to the world of the living. In aggregate they form a vast spiritual reservoir, called Les Invisibles or Les Morts et les Mysteres—a well of energy available on the other side of any mirror or beneath the surface of any pool.
This near presence of the spirits of the dead foreshortens the Haitian sense of history, so that the events of the Haitian Revolution, though two hundred years in the past, may seem to have happened only yesterday. It is as if for two hundred years the Haitian Revolution has been sleeping very close to the surface, sometimes stirring to press against the fragile membrane that separates it from the world of the present day. Particular Iwa express themselves from the reservoir of Les Morts et les Mysteres, and show their power to govern the actions and the policies of the living. The Duvalier regime, which ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986, particularly associated itself with the spirit of Jean-Jacques Dessalines—the spirit of Koupe tet, boule kay, which rules by force and by terror, which could wash away racism, but only in blood.
In 1990, a democratic revolution brought a gentler, more accommodating spirit to life in the land. In 2004, Haiti's bicentennial year, this second revolution seemed to fail.
The magical work of Vodou is often done by the creation of SL pwen, an object with a spiritual force bound up in it. In the opinion of some seers, the violence of Haitian history for the past two centuries is explained by the unfortunate fact that the pwen for the revolution was made on the element of fire. In 2004, the revolutionary pwen was supposed to be done over again, on water. If the effort succeeded, the result remains to be seen.
But Haiti's history since 1804 is scarcely more violent or more troubled than that of the world at large. In the last years of the twentieth century, a priest of Borgne said to me that what Haiti needed to find a way out of its difficulties was the spirit of Toussaint Louverture. At the opening of the twenty-first century, the United States and the rest of the world could use that spirit too.
Afterword
The Image of Toussaint
In December 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War, the abolitionist and justly renowned orator Wendell Phillips delivered a speech on Toussaint Louverture in New York and Boston. As part of his peroration he drove home this point: “If I stood here tonight to tell the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I here to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it directly from your hearts—you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his Country. I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards—men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials from his biography are from the lips of his enemies.”1
This passage is as subtle as it is splendid: the deft insertion of Toussaint into the peerage of the great white