E3W Literature | University of Texas

C.L.R. James
The Black Jacobins
Penguin Books, 2001 (1938)
364 + xx pages
£12.99
Alejo Carpentier
The Kingdom of This World
Trans. Harriet de Onís
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 (1949)
180 + xii pages
$13

Reviewed by Chistopher Micklethwait

The Haitian Revolution (1789-1804), oft credited as the first successful slave revolt and first black republic in modern history, is a keystone topic in the study of the African Americas. Two keystone texts engaging the Haitian Revolution—C.L.R. James’s Marxist historical study The Black Jacobins, originally published in 1938, and Alejo Carpentier’s prototypical magical realist novel The Kingdom of This World, first published in 1949—persist even after half a century in focusing and forming critical attention on this historic event within the evolving contexts of the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, and, more broadly, throughout the Third World. These two books emerge from a pandemic identity crisis of the colonized world, accentuated by the endemic fragmentation of the Caribbean: James, born and educated in Trinidad, goes on to write The Black Jacobins between London and Paris; similarly Carpentier, born and educated in Cuba, writes The Kingdom of This World while exiled from Cuba during the Batista regime. In this sense, these works are important as well for the precedent they set as local Caribbean, albeit not Haitian, self-representations.

C.L.R. James begins The Black Jacobins with the initial colonization of the island in the late fifteenth century, describing the extermination of the native Taino people and the importation of African slaves beginning in 1517. From here, James analyzes in the first two chapters “Property” and “Owners” the political economy of slavery with the goal of exposing the material conditions for the slave revolt that would be touched off by the French Revolution in 1789. From these initial chapters on, James grapples admirably with the complicated layers of power and influence that pit the British against the French, the white slave-owners against the white craftspeople and the wealthy landowning Mulattoes, and all against the masses of African slaves in San Domingo. James takes the work’s title from this political mêlée, underscoring his basic argument that the development of democratic rights in the imperial centers would spill over and reverberate through the colonies, while at the same time prophesying the inevitability of political radicalism and violence in the process of decolonization.

More importantly, James insists through his narrative of this revolution that the oppressed would not find true allies in the imperial powers; rather, their only means to guarantee individual freedom would be through the sovereignty of their own independent state. The greatest challenge of this text is to keep current with these shifting allegiances as James follows the strings manipulating the revolts and insurrections in Haiti to the hands of the various factions in revolutionary France. The reward for accepting this challenge is a deeper grasp of how the events that take place in the marginalized, colonized world can shake empires and reconfigure the global superstructure of trade and diplomacy. James shows his readers that for a few brief years, some two centuries ago, an enslaved people revolted and became one of the world’s superpowers. Sadly, James stops his historical account short of explaining what role the new leaders of free Haiti played in squandering that power so quickly and so finally. Here, perhaps, is the greatest lesson we have yet to learn from the Haitian Revolution.

Despite James’s skill in narrating complicated political intrigues, The Black Jacobins is shot through with analytic schizophrenia. James seems to be at odds with himself as to whether the Haitian Revolution is a truly Marxist revolution of the masses or a classic example of history written by great men. One could reasonably accuse James of constructing a hagiography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, elevating him to a mythic level that he doubtlessly deserves in literature but perhaps not in a work of history. In this sense, James’s history of the revolution appears to succumb to a magical realism of its own.
The Kingdom of This World covers roughly the same period as The Black Jacobins, but stretches a few years beyond the declaration of independence of January 1, 1804, to give the reader a vision of the replication of slavery that took place after independence with the autocratic rule of Henri Christophe. Aside from Mackandal, Christophe is the only recognizable figure from The Black Jacobins who also appears substantially in The Kingdom of This World. Carpentier, perhaps true to poetic license and the laws of fiction, strips from his version the presence of “great men.” Toussaint L’Ouverture is not once mentioned in the novel. Similarly, General Leclerc, tapped by Napoleon to restore French rule on the island, gives way in The Kingdom of This World to his wife Pauline Bonaparte, replacing what would be a figure of imperial military power with a portrait of the Romantic dilettante who finds an escape from recognition of European colonial supremacy in the erotic and exotic fantasy of the native. Carpentier no doubt uses Pauline to level criticism at the European Left he circulated with in 1930s Paris.

But the true “hero” of The Kingdom of this World is the enigmatic Ti Noël, a minor character from a formalist perspective who in fact plays the central role of unifying the often disconnected strands of narrative as they would appear to the perspective of the masses of ordinary Haitians. A personal friend of Mackandal during his childhood, Ti Noël meanders through the political landmines of the revolution, drifting in and out of servitude to his master M. Lenormand de Mézy and materializing on the sidelines of major moments in the revolution. Ti Noël allows the reader a spectator’s view of some of the more significant events in the history of Haiti’s struggle for independence. His steady slide into senility and dementia as the revolt wears on into the years of King Christophe amplifies the disorientation that distinguishes Carpentier’s version so completely from James’s. Where James fashions the Haitian revolution into a grand master-narrative that runs through to the global emergence of national liberation movements in the mid twentieth century, Carpentier resists any totalizing perspective, any unifying narrative, beyond that offered by the humblest of his characters.

The paratextual elements of these two editions deserve special attention. Penguin’s 2001 edition of The Black Jacobins boasts a wealth of such elements: an 8-page introduction by James Walvin; James’s updated foreword from the 1980 edition; James’s original preface to the first edition; and the significant appendix “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro” from the 1963 edition. One element missing in Penguin’s edition is a further three-paragraph preface from the 1962 Vintage edition, but this is a negligible omission since it simply describes the appendix and the prophetic final pages of the first edition. Nevertheless, both the casual reader and the scholar will be satisfied with the complete packaging of this book, as these paratextual elements play such a vital role in connecting The Black Jacobins and the historical events it describes to deeper and broader trends in modern history.

If Penguin’s edition of The Black Jacobins warrants praise for the wholeness of its text, then Farrar, Strauss and Giroux’s 2006 edition of The Kindgom of This World deserves a certain amount of censure. While Edwidge Danticat’s 2006 introduction to this edition updates the novel’s historical context to include the January 2004 coup d’êtat against President Aristide and adds the voice of a modern Haitian writer, her paraphrasing of Carpentier’s short prologue to the Spanish edition leaves much to be desired. Carpentier’s prologue is without question one of the most influential statements about Latin American literature in the 20th century, a manifesto of magical realism that declares a sort of cultural independence from the reigning trends in contemporary literature (namely, Surrealism). Danticat’s introduction disarms Carpentier’s original prologue, rendering it a simple expression of local Haitian aesthetics:
Magical realism…lives and thrives in past and present Haiti, just as it does in this novel. It is in the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken and the unspoken…From Haiti’s fertile communal imagination sprang a fantastic sense of possibility, which certainly contributed to bondsmen and –women defeating the most powerful armies of the time.
If Danticat succeeds here in preparing the reader to understand The Kingdom of This World as a work of magical realism within the narrower Haitian national context, she fails in giving the reader a grounded understanding of the novel’s (and magical realism’s) significance in the equally important global and regional contexts. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux would have better served their readers had they included in this edition both Danticat’s introduction, a valuable “modernization” of the packaging of this novel, and a translation of Carpentier’s hugely more valuable original prologue. As it stands, Danticat’s introduction makes this novel eminently consumable for the wider reading public, but less so for scholars, professors, and students. The publishers have, in any case, earned this reader’s gratitude for maintaining Harriet de Onís’s lucid, lyrical translation of Carpentier’s Spanish text.

In sum, these two essential texts about the Haitian Revolution, approaching the subject through historical and fictional techniques respectively, endure as the best introductions to the deep confluence of the Haitian Revolution with broader regional trends, recurrent and ever-present problems of colonialism and empire, and universal questions of human rights and armed struggle. On the literary plane, A Kingdom of this World will start its readers on a journey to understand the great mutations in aesthetic technique that would give birth to the literary revolution of the Boom in Latin American novels and their propulsion to global eminence in the 1950s and 1960s. On the historical plane, The Black Jacobins introduces a tradition of Marxist thought in the analysis and critique of empire.