Diasporic Ruptures in Colonial Saint Domingue

Abstract

Evelyne Trouillot’s first novel, Rosalie l’infâme, frames the original diasporic configuration of the New World colony of Saint-Domingue in terms of slavery’s historical wounds. Over ten million enslaved Africans were brought to the New World as chattel to be exploited as field and domestic labor on white plantations. Approximately one-and-a-half million of them were sent to the French colonies in the Caribbean. Saint-Domingue—renamed Haiti after independence in 1804—received nearly half this number. Slave labor transformed the island into one of the richest and most productive colonies in the Americas through the cultivation of sugar, coffee, and tobacco, thereby making France one of the richest slave-holding nations in Europe (Moitt 1995, 155). However, Frances acknowledgment of its nefarious colonial past has remained rather tentative despite increased pressure exerted both from within the country and the international community. These human rights groups have demanded Frances accountability for perpetuating and profiting from the slave trade. As a result of the growing tension between the French nation and its citizens, who also include the descendants of formerly enslaved people, the government established a special commemoration committee tided, Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage (Committee to Commemorate Slavery) “in accordance with the statutory order of 5 January 2004, which applies the law of 10 May 2001 qualifying slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity” (Reinhardt 2006, 158).

The ultimate mark or power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.

Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past