The Colonial System Unveiled: Baron de Vastey, Scribe of a Kingdom

Machine transcript. Names and Kreyòl words may be misspelled. Tap a time to play from there. Also on Jou.

2:09Chris Bongie Off-putting, inasmuch as Vate was so closely related to power, he seemed like a kind of inevitable accompaniment to King Henry Christophe, right? That there was the king, the sovereign, and then there was the writer, the scribe. Christophe and Vate were very closely linked to one another. And that close linkage is very important to how Vate is represented in the plays of Césaire and Welcott. And it's something that they're kind of very interested in, almost to the point of a kind of obsessive interest, because they can see themselves in Vate. What would it be for these writers to have a kind of affiliation, a close affiliation to power? Of course, Césaire did have a relation to power, in terms of he himself was a politician and not just a writer. He served in the French Parliament. So for Césaire, Vate can be a kind of a figure through whom Césaire kind of thinks about his double self, about his self as a kind of politician on the one hand, and his self as a writer. What's the relation between politics and writing? And for Welcott, it's a little bit different. Welcott was sort of very anti-political and kind of, from a very early age, fashioned a kind of an identity for himself as a capital A artist. Capital A artists don't get involved in politics. For Welcott, that was part of his problem with, you know, Black power. That was part of his problem with more openly kind of seemingly politicized poets like Camel Brathwaite, you know, that he wanted to, Walcott wanted to define the writer as a kind of a capital A artist. And Vate was useful for Walcott as a kind of counterpoint to that. This is what happens to writers when they get too close to power, right? That they're kind of corrupt figures. They didn't keep the necessary distance between themselves and, in this case, in Vate's case, King Christophe. They didn't establish enough of a distance between their writing and the realm of politics. So, which brings me up to this,

4:30Patrick Jean-Baptiste what you described as this binary of sovereign and scribe. You said that we can't salvage Vate from posterity unless we unshackle him from his scribal roles as Christophe's mouthpiece, basically. Do you think, based on your research and what you discovered by the end of the book that you did do that, did you unshackle him? Did you find enough to unshackle him from his scribal role?

4:56Chris Bongie My whole point about Vate as a kind of a scribe is that he can't be unshackled from a certain relation to power and that it's kind of the wrong sort of way of looking at him to attempt to unshackle him, to sort of treat him as a capital A artist or somebody who is doing something that's not related, closely related to power and the requirements of that sovereign power. David Morgan And I make that argument in a kind of, it's a contentious argument. It's the basic argument of friends and enemies, the scribal politics of post-colonial literature, is that the idea of a capital A artist who's somehow divorced from power, who doesn't in some ways kind of embody and enact a certain scribe, scribal dimension to writing, that's just a fiction. It's a convenient fiction. It's the fiction upon which is founded the idea of literature with a capital L as something that can kind of be unshackled from precisely a relation, a complicitous, an ideological relation to power. So when I talk about Vate as a scribe, I'm not simply referring to the biographical facts, that he was indeed served as a secretary for King Christophe and that Christophe would turn to him and say, hey, can you write this pamphlet about Pétion because I'm trying to, you know, I need another attack on Pétion or I need another kind of critique of French colonial discourse. I'm not, when I refer to Vate as a scribe, I'm not merely talking about that kind of limited biographical relation of his to Christophe's, but I'm talking about something broader that he shares with, you know, seemingly non-political writers who don't have a kind of obvious relation to power. From my perspective, the people who make those claims about themselves as capital A artists or whatever are attempting to distance themselves from the possibility that they remain in a kind of, they remain shackled as it were to the sovereign power and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and political needs and requirements and imperatives. So for me, the idea of the scribe is not simply this very kind of restricted, you know, category, social category, you know, you happen to be the secretary of, of the king, but it's, it's something more basic to, to any act of public writing.

7:38Patrick Jean-Baptiste And it makes life easier for historians down the line, right? To be able to, to, to judge intent or the veracity of whatever that scribe writes, right? Because if the work is, if the work is tied to closely to the people in power, how, you know, what, what, what validity in terms of accuracy can you give to

8:01Chris Bongie the, to the text produced by the writer? Well, yeah, but the accuracy, I mean, you know, we talked about authenticity, you know, where, where's the authenticity. And of course, that's a problem with ascribal writing understood in a very narrow sense. It's like, well, there's nothing authentic here. The, the writer is just doing the bidding of the sovereign power, nothing to see here. This, this is just the, this is just rhetoric. This is just ideology. This is just propaganda. And, and, and there are people who have read writers like Vate in those terms. So if you turn to the, the prominent, the historian of Haiti, David Gegas, he'll sort of say, you know, when he reads Colonial System Unveiled, he'll say, well, you know, it's not a work of history. It lacks that, that kind of authenticity. It's the work of Christophe's propagandists. So how seriously can we take anything that we, we find, you know, in a work like this? So that's a, you know, a very bad, kind of cynical reading of somebody like Vate. The power of Vate consists precisely in his ability time and again, to sort of, if you will, unshackle himself to some extent from the, the mere role of, of scribe and say things that, that, that continue to strike us today as relevant and illuminating in terms of the, sort of the understanding of a racialized society he's able to, to mount as early as 1814.

9:27Patrick Jean-Baptiste I'm glad you mentioned about his relevance today. What, what would you think, based on everything you've, you've read about him, that, what would he think of, of disaster capitalism in Haiti today? And you, you referred to Jean Casimir talking about the imposition of an informal trustorship over Haiti. What would Vate say about Haiti's current dilemma? And what would, what does this book still resonate with what's going on in Haiti today?

9:55Chris Bongie Well, I mean, Bakke would say, you know, this is, this is what, what, what happens when, when the right person isn't in charge of the, the country, right? I mean, he is very much committed to a kind of, what's been called a kind of monocratic idea of government, which is exemplified by the idea of a king or a sovereign of, of Haiti, uh, Christophe, right? So he was totally committed to the idea of the need for one ruler of the, of the country who could kind of, uh, uh, embody the, the, the, the country and its progressive direction into, uh, a globalized future or, or whatever. So, you know, in terms of just in terms of the simple politics of it all, I mean, when we read Colonial System Unveiled, when we read Vate's other works, uh, we're seeing somebody who's very much in the line of, you know, Toussaint as well. The idea that Haiti needs a, a strong ruler. So obviously today there, there is no such strong ruler. And Vate would also say, look at what replaced Christophe. It's this corrupt, you know, quasi quote unquote Republican regime of Jean-Pierre Boyer and, uh, people who are just out to, to, to make a buck and who have no relation to the, the Haitian masses. And so the Haitian elite, you know, was his primary, one of his primary targets in his work in the 1810s. That elite for him was instantiated by Etienne and, and, you know, everybody who was sort of committed to, uh, uh, Petion's, uh, Petion's rule. So it's a little bit difficult to say what, what Vate would, would, would, would do now, because I guess you'd have to say that he'd, he'd attribute the things that are going wrong in part to the lack of a strong government inside Haiti. But of course, and, and that is not very appealing, you know, the idea, oh, we need a strong ruler, especially after Duvalier and all of that. It's, it's kind of like, eh, you know, a strong ruler, but the aspects of Vate's arguments that would resonate much more strongly to today would have to do with, you know, the external, the problem of, you know, external forces and the effects that they're having in terms of shaping the Haitian polity to today and disaster capitalism, et cetera. So he'd be right on board with those kinds of arguments about, you know, disaster capitalism and, and the ways in which the great powers in the U.S. and France and Canada, et cetera, you know, continue to limit the possibilities of, of, of, of what Haiti can be. He'd be right on board with those sorts of arguments. But in terms of his understanding of, of what was needed in Haiti in, in, in the 1810s, he was very committed to a strong ruler, the idea of a, a kingdom. And that is not necessarily something that, that's very palatable for us today.

12:54Patrick Jean-Baptiste I tell you, a lot of Haitians, and I'm in touch with a lot of, in the audience, they, most of them, I would say, are all about having a strong leader, not necessarily in the mold of Duvalier. You mentioned my dear sister, Dr. Marlene Haitian sister, Marlene Adap. He said that her infectious enthusiasm for Vaté was sort of an integral part of, of you writing this book.

13:20Chris Bongie I had to say, but we were, you know, at the time, you know, in the years leading up to the, the, the publication of, of this text, you know, you know, we were in constant, you know, communication, mostly about trying to figure out, you know, where Vaté came from. It was always the great mystery. You know, he sort of seemed to appear out of nowhere in 1814. And, you know, for five years, just publishing all of these, these texts, you know, which in some ways marvelously anticipate, you know, 20th century anti-colonialism. But, but what was he doing, you know, before that? And who was he? Where did he, where did he come from? And Marlene had done, you know, quite a bit of work on representations of Vaté and, you know, historians. Some historians thought that he was an old man at the time that he wrote Colonial System Unveiled. It kind of got him confused with his, the birth date of his white father. You know, other people, you know, especially in the 19th century, but on into the 20th century, assumed that he was, you know, quote unquote, quote unquote, black and had no sense that, you know, he came from the sort of the milieu of the genre de couleur libre. So very, very, very little was known about him. And so we're trying to like, you know, figure out, okay, where did he come from? What were the life experiences that, you know, that led to the writing of these works from 1814 to 1819? And so it was kind of interesting that, that there was some poems that had been published in France by a guy called Vaté, Pompey Valentin Vaté. And that was the name under which Vaté had been known. Everybody assumed that his name was Pompey Valentin Vaté. And so is it the case that, that, that, that Vaté, when he was much younger in the 1790s, was publishing French poems in Paris? Well, there's a possibility. And when our edition, my edition came out in 2014 of The Colonial System Unveiled, it was still an open question. It was still, you know, kind of unclear who wrote those poems. And, you know, and it was also equally unclear what Vaté had been doing, what part, if any, he had to play in the Haitian Revolution. So a few weeks after this edition came out, the French genealogist Laurent Cadillis, who was a kind of distant relative of the Vatés, he published a self-published book biography of the Vaté family, which was generated by a kind of a cache of many dozens of letters exchanged between the Vaté family in France and the Vaté family in Saint-Domingue, dating from the 1770s on into the 1830s, I believe. And so from that kind of correspondence, you know, we got a clearer picture of Vaté's origins as a, you know, the son of a white father and a light-skinned, free mother. And we got a sense of some dates. Marlena had already discovered his birth certificate, I believe it was, in 1781. And Kevillis' biography made it clear that Vaté had gone to Paris in 1790 and that he'd been there right up to 1796. So six formative years spent in France, mostly living with his French relatives in Normandy. Nobody knew that. I didn't know that for sure when we published the edition of Colonial System on Vail. So that adds immeasurably to what we know about Vaté.

17:00Patrick Jean-Baptiste I wanted to ask, this is just sort of my own, these little details I find important. In the acknowledgement, you talk about a Lawrence Bungee. I'm assuming that's a family member who helped you situate Vaté on a Hume. Is it Sade, the Nigerian singer, or Saad?

17:22Chris Bongie Definitely Saad.

17:23Patrick Jean-Baptiste I know who Hume is, the philosopher, but is it Charnier or Saad?

17:28Chris Bongie That is the Marquis de Saad, yeah.

17:31Patrick Jean-Baptiste Okay.

17:33Chris Bongie I immediately went there.

17:34Patrick Jean-Baptiste Can you talk about that? What is this Hume-Saad continuum?

17:38Chris Bongie Oh, okay. Well, that is just the sort of little autobiographical joke that one tends to make in the Acknowledgements page. And I'm speaking there of my father, who was a literary critic and historian of 18th century France. You know, very, very familiar with the archives. And also somebody with whom I had lots of conversations about, you know, 18th century philosophy. And he wrote a book on Hume, and he wrote a book on the Marquis de Saad. And like all of his books, they tended to be incredibly well-researched and very archival and making points that were sort of, you know, politically maybe counterintuitive. For instance, his book on Marquis de Saad is, from a certain perspective, it's commonsensical. It's not counterintuitive at all. He argued, you know, for, against the sadolatrie, the sort of, the love of Saad that one finds at the Marquis de Saad, that one finds in so many highfalutin, you know, literary critics, that somehow the Marquis de Saad sort of unshackled the human imagination in a kind of a good way. And my father, you know, made a very different argument about Saad, just kind of reminding people that, in fact, he was a sadist. And you started thinking about, you know, his various, you know, relations with people of the lower classes, that these were pretty, he was a pretty nasty fellow. And that there's no real genius in his works, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then, of course, in terms of Hume, you know, Hume's a very problematic figure for Black studies because he's one of these seemingly very intelligent, you know, 18th century European philosophers who couldn't muster up the kind of the cultural imagination to see beyond the kind of racist vision of Blackness. Blackness and Africa, right? Hume, Hegel, you know, everybody pretty much in the 18th century, early 19th century, you know, were just sort of incapable of Thomas Jefferson, incapable of kind of going beyond these sort of dreadful, racist limiting, racist stereotypes, right? So, so that's, that doesn't even begin to explain the, if you look, but I guess, if I used to say that it's, it's autobiographical and I've had lots of, you know, had lots of conversations with my father who passed away a few years ago.

20:20Patrick Jean-Baptiste Who do you hear that?

20:21Chris Bongie Yeah. And who was also, you know, more importantly really was, I used to talk about him as there's a famous American historian called Robert Darnton. He's famous, you know, in 18th century French studies and, you know, for his archival work on archives. I'd always refer to my father as the Canadian Darnton, much to his kind of, I don't think it was amusement. He particularly liked the illusion, but I mean, he taught me everything I know about the archives. And a lot of my work has been in the archives over the last 10, 20 years.

20:51Patrick Jean-Baptiste I look at the Haitian revolution based on what you wrote here, sort of a hardware versus software situation. Because when I read Marlena's Awakening the Ashes, a recent book, she talked about how the revolutionaries, the Haitian revolutionaries were doers. And then people like Vaté who came after were, you know, wrote about what the doers did, right? So it's more abstract and software. Here's what you wrote. You said, despite the new attention being paid to the Haitian revolution, its immediate aftermath remains in historiographical shadows, offering as it does a seemingly disappointing vista that fails to match the transformative expectations raised by the idea of 1804. End of quote. Can you flesh that out, what you meant by the idea of 1804?

21:47Chris Bongie Ah, well, the idea of 1804 is, that's a quote there from a guy called Nick Nesbitt, who has done a lot of work on the Haitian revolution and kind of reads it as this ultimate sort of moment of what he refers to as sort of universal emancipation. And 1804. And 1804 and Haitian independence in 1884. And 1804 and Haitian independence in Nesbitt's account becomes this kind of, well, what it is, of course, a world historical moment in which we get a sense, a better sense than we get from the American revolution or the French revolution of what real equality might be, of what a universal emancipation might look like. So that's from Nick Nesbitt. And he definitely represents a kind of a way of looking at the Haitian revolution, the sort of surface in the late 1990s, early 2000s, that really drew importance to, sorry, drew attention to its, you know, its world historical importance and kind of tried to root the Haitian revolution in kind of radical enlightenment philosophy. Right. So there are other ways of treating the Haitian revolution and 1804 as world historical that don't necessarily take the root that Nesbitt took, which is to kind of link the Haitian revolution to emancipatory thought as conceived of in European philosophers like Hegel. For a lot of people, for a lot of people, Nesbitt's view of 1804 is just overly philosophical and remains kind of too tied to a sort of Eurocentric perspective to really be an adequate way of explaining or looking at the Haitian revolution. But yeah, so the idea of 1804 is this very, you know, this moment of emancipation, it's very powerful. And then people have had a harder time dealing with what came after 1804. It seems a bit disappointing, you know, in relation to the kind of the emancipatory sort of possibilities that were opened up by the Haitian defeat of the French, the overcoming of colonial rule and, you know, the seeming victorious attack against white supremacist kind of rule. You know, 1804, what I wrote in 2014 about, you know, people not talking about the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, I think that's a lot less true 10 years later. There's a lot of historical work and even literary critical work being devoted, good work being devoted to the immediate post-independence period. And of course, Marlena Doubt has written a lot about that in Awakening the Ashes, Chelsea Stieber's book, Paper Wars. And I know you've interviewed Chelsea. That is, you know, a fantastic sort of point of entry for getting a sense of what can be done with post-independence Haitian literature. Once you are no longer trying to turn it into some sort of transformative kind of, you know, revolutionary cultural activity. But, you know, you sort of see its limits and then begin to explore the potential within those limits.

25:09Patrick Jean-Baptiste Unless I read you wrong, you said basically the Haitian revolution is a continuing project. It's still going on, isn't it?

25:19Chris Bongie Yeah.

25:19Patrick Jean-Baptiste In Haiti.

25:20Chris Bongie That's why I talk about a, you know, in this book, I use that concept of the post-slashed revolutionary, right? Such that the Haitian revolution doesn't end in 1803. You know, it doesn't sort of end on the 1st of January, 1804 with independence, but it is an ongoing project. But, of course, the kind of what some people would refer to as the tragedy of 1804 is that that's the moment when the bifurcation of the revolution really becomes apparent. And it was always there, right? And that's the bifurcation between the elite, you know, the military and the intellectual elite on the one hand, and the masses, the people, you know, who were seemingly joined in 1803 in a kind of, you know, victorious ouster of the French. But once independence is achieved, you know, we see very clearly that the elites are there to rule. The whites are gone in their place. You know, we have various forms of elites. And that their relation to the masses is problematic at best and always a disciplinary relation. How are we going to discipline the masses? How are we going to keep them working? How are we going to turn Haiti into a prosperous state? It's the classic, you know, state versus nation bifurcation that Michel Rauf-Triot talked about. And so the revolution, you know, doesn't end because the injustice and the social hierarchies do not simply disappear with independence, right? And in fact, you know, people like Jean Casimir will argue all the ways in which there are continuities between the late colonial regime in the 1790s and post-colonial Haiti in the 1800s and the 1810s. That the elites, whether in the south or the north, learned a lot from the French about the ways in which to organize the masses and keep them working. And of course, their refusal to simply accede to what the elite wanted resulted in, from Casimir's perspective, you know, the ongoing formation, the revolutionary formation of the counter plantation, right? Sort of a resistance to and a kind of divorce from the state, the Haitian state, the elites and their needs and their sort of sense of what Haiti should do. From Casimir's perspective, you know, the revolution didn't end in 1804. And there are a lot of kind of unexpected continuities between late colonial French rule and post-independence Haitian rule when it comes to the relations between the minorities, the minority elite and the vast majority of Haitians.

28:19Patrick Jean-Baptiste Where would you place Vate's work within the context of Atlantic abolitionism, whether in the United States or England?

28:29Chris Bongie Well, I think that's an interesting question. And it's a question that kind of begs another question. It's like, why would one have to, you know, why would one have to situate Vate's work within this transatlantic abolitionist sphere? And of course, that's what happened. I mean, Vate very quickly, you know, became a talking point amongst British abolitionists, French abolitionists like, you know, Grégoire certainly knew of Vate. In North America, as Marlena Dout has hampily documented, Vate's name was a sort of a touchstone, both in terms of white abolition circles, but also in terms of an emerging African-American press in the 1810s, 1820s, right? So Vate's work gets taken up, you know, by abolitionist circles. And his later works, you know, from the latter half of the 1810s are themselves kind of more openly, more explicitly engaged by this problem of, you know, where do we fit in? How can we fit into the transatlantic abolitionist sphere? I don't think colonial system unveiled, and I think that's part of its power. I don't think that it fits into that quite as readily. I don't think it does the sort of simple duty that need to be performed by the abolitionist text. It's doing that maybe, but maybe it's doing something more and something different, but that was quickly sort of rerouted into kind of terms that the transatlantic abolitionist sphere could understand. And that Vate, in turn, as he matured as a writer, you know, understood, you know, some of the moves that needed to be made in order to write to those people, right? But why would one have to write to one's fellow Haitians in those terms? You see what I'm getting at there? Yeah. There's a kind of, there's a power, the minute you sort of start talking about Vate in relation to the transatlantic abolitionist sphere, part of what Vate, you know, powerfully represents has been that kind of lost or marginalized. Because once you're within that abolitionist sphere, you're back within a kind of dominant sort of logic, a dominant logic that whiteness can understand and where whiteness can remain central. So there's a problem there.

31:13Patrick Jean-Baptiste Which brings me to the Thomas Clarkson's letter to King Christoph, which dated July 10th, 1820, I think. The letter is six pages long, you wrote, and it contains about eight things that Clarkson is asking King Christoph to consider. Is this an example of this sort of taking Vate and just sort of, you know, sticking him inside the abolitionist project?

31:43Chris Bongie Yeah. Yes, absolutely. You know, that's, you're referring to the part one of the introduction to the translation where I go on at length about this Clarkson letter in 1820. And it shows how important Vate had become for the British abolitionists, right? I mean, here you have this like very literate black man from Haiti who's capable of sort of representing, you know, Haiti and its needs in the sort of way that abolitionists like Wilberforce and Clarkson can kind of positively respond to and that they can recognize, right? They say, we can use this man. And Vate is aware of that by this point. And so there's a kind of a mutual relation developing there right at the end of his tragically curtailed career. That doesn't sum up Vate's role as a writer, but certainly as we move towards 1820, Vate is more and more sort of conscripted by this abolitionist sphere and the sort of the power dynamics that come along with this. He's lost a good deal of what we might refer to as his sort of autonomy as a writer that's kind of on display in his earliest work, Colonial System Unveiled, which itself, as we've discussed, is a kind of scribal work, you know, as he's doing it for King Christophe. But there's a real different vibe in Colonial System Unveiled to what he's doing later in life. And that change of vibe has a lot to do, I think, with the extent to which Christophe, you know, and his regime were desperate for forms of recognition, including the recognition by the transatlantic abolitionist sphere. But also that would lead to the recognition of Haiti, or at least of the Northern Kingdom of Haiti as an independent country. And that became sort of the consuming desire of Christophe and people like Vate.

33:49Patrick Jean-Baptiste What did you think of the tone of that letter? Do you think it was suggestive, differential to Christophe? Because it was basically kind of like a media campaign, right? You know, we want the rest of Europe to think of, you know, you've been maligned, King Christophe, so here's a way. Let's enlist Vate into this to kind of present you in a more, in a different light, to counter, sort of like a counter narrative. What did you think of, like, the whole tone and the intent of Clarkson on that? Since it sounds like you're saying Christophe, I guess, agreed to that, right?

34:25Chris Bongie Well, we do. I mean, this letter is sort of kind of tragic in the sense that Clarkson is making all these plans for Christophe and Vate, which testify to Clarkson's own sort of personal, you know, psychology and his, you know, authentic, positive, but also viewed from another perspective, weird, condescending relation to blackness. Yeah, but that's a whole different topic. But in 1820, he's talking about Vate and Christophe as if they're active, you know, and when the letter gets there, you know, to Haiti, I mean, Christophe and Vate are dead. They can't, they can't accede to his wishes or refuse their wishes. I guess the larger point that absolutely needs to be made in terms of the desire for recognition on the part of Christophe's regime and on the part of Vesalines' regime before him and on the part of Toussaint's regime before him, all of which, you know, generated media campaigns. Gavrid Jensen has talked very convincingly about Toussaint's, you know, media campaigns. Chelsea Spieber has talked about Vesalines' media campaigns, you know, Christophe. Really, after the publication of Colonial System Unveiled from 1814 to 1820, that's where the brunt of literary production is happening in the Northern Kingdom. It's all about, you know, trying to be recognized. The point that needs to be made, though, is that Christophe, you know, and Vate definitely had a point beyond which they would not go, right? They recognized that recognition has the potential to be the most sort of demeaning kind of form of human relation in some ways. The recognition by abolitionists or, you know, the recognition that comes from other countries sort of officially saying, yes, Haiti, you exist, right? And they would have, aware as they were of the kind of the nefarious dimension to politics and the ethics of recognition, they drew the line in terms of, say, questions of indemnity, you know? So much of Vate's writing towards the end taken up with just kind of ridiculing Pétion for this idea of paying indemnities to the French in order to gain recognition from them as an independent country. You know, Christophe, you know, was absolutely opposed to that, wouldn't have gone there. And so when people talk about, you know, the differences between the North and the South between 1807 and 1820, you know, when Haiti was divided, in a sense, you know, yeah, they're both being led by elites. What's the difference? Well, the one important difference is that the Northern Kingdom was led by somebody who was going to draw the line, you know, when it came to what it would cost to be recognized officially as a nation, right? There would be no reparations. Whereas, you know, Pétion's government, you know, initiated the idea of indemnities in 1814. And 10 years later, you know, Pétion's successor, Boyer, was the one who, you know, kind of said, OK, let's do this. And they were very happy that it was done because they knew that it might facilitate life, at least for themselves, you know, to have this kind of recognition.

37:53Patrick Jean-Baptiste You included the toast that at the Café des Etrangers in Cap Henry on 24th August, 1860. This is like the best approach I've heard on allyship, what it should be, where it was the Queen's birthday, and Vaté raised the glass and said the following. You describe this as the double-edged toast, and I love that. Quote, End of quote. I like that a lot, Professor.

38:45Chris Bongie Well, yeah. And of course, it's kind of viewed from a certain perspective. It's immature and indecent, right? And yet, why would one take that kind of understanding of what he's saying there, the ultimate recourse to violence as a sort of righteous self-defense? Why does it appear inappropriate, indecent, immature? And to whom would it appear as such? Certainly, Vaté, you know, in his later writings, can't, you know, readily incorporate that kind of violence, that kind of sense of, whereas he does in colonial system unveiled. He can't, because it's, because, say, from the perspective of somebody like Clarkson and an abolitionist like Clarkson, that would sound sort of horrific, you know, like violence, right? It's the whole problem of Dessalinean violence as well, right? Which we talked about, I think, with Chelsea. It's, you know, from a certain perspective, it seems kind of intolerable. And yet, all you have to do is just kind of change your perspective to sort of see the ways in which Dessalinean violence might be admirable, might be necessary if one is going to somehow combat neocolonialism, racism, et cetera. And so it's the same with Vaté's toast. It's like, where's the place, you know, it's not, it doesn't show a good sense of decorum, right? From a certain perspective. But from another perspective, you know, why can we not just sort of simply say, yeah, as you did, I like it a lot. But what does it mean to like it a lot? And there you sort of raised, raises the question of violence, right? And, you know, what do we, what do we do with revolutionary violence? It's always something that makes people uncomfortable, you know, in terms of not just the Haitian revolution, but its aftermath, right? The 1804 massacres, you know, of February, March, and April that were launched by Dessaline, you know, that's a very uncomfortable post-independence phenomenon, right? What do we do with that? It's like, it seems from a certain perspective, unjustified. It seems kind of like the wrong move, at the very least. And it seems to just be replicating a colonial violence rather than, you know, responding to it in a positive way. And yet all you have to do is change your perspective on it, and maybe it can be read differently. And that's certainly what the great Haitian thinker Jean Fouchard did. Fouchard has a great lengthy account of Dessaline's justification of this violence, the 1804 massacres. And he says this is an epic deed on Dessaline's part. You know, some people go, eh, it doesn't matter. This is a kind of, I don't have his exact words with me, but he's very possible to the point of seeing it almost through an epic lens. It's like this had to be done. This was something that needed to be done for us and for us to sort of emerge as a nation. That was Dessaline's logic. That was the logic of Juste Jean Latte, who helped Dessaline with the particular speech of April 28, 1804, justifying what had been happening over the past two months. And so from a certain perspective, I call it our perspective. Ironically, our, that kind of, you know, universal humanist sort of perspective. It seems pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty problematic. But, but, but, but maybe what's problematic is how easy it is and how comfortable we feel. We, quote unquote, feel occupying that, that humanist sort of position from which some of these acts of violence or claims of violence, such as in Vate's toast, you know, the, the ways in which we, we distance ourselves. Mm-hmm.

42:50Patrick Jean-Baptiste And he, he mentioned in the colonial system of Ville how basically we all start, start out, you know, being very human and incorruptible, but that the system itself turned, corrupted the, man, he named names, didn't he? He named quite a few names of the people who committed that the very, the whole colonial system itself is, is predicated on violence. So it's, it's justified. Yeah. To respond to that in a way to regain your humanity.

43:25Chris Bongie Exactly. Yeah. And, and that is, that is the, the kind of the basic anti-colonial argument. And it's an argument that somebody like Frantz Fanon would reiterate in the middle of the 20th century. And, you know, sort of saying that, yeah, violence is part of, of, of the anti-colonial movement. And you're not going to make any gains against colonialism without it. So Vate very much sort of anticipates somebody like Fanon in that respect as, as, as Dessaline. And yet, of course, you know, you can sort of see that, that, that not everybody would be comfortable with that, that argument. I did, I have go on in Friends and Enemies quite a bit about the problem of revolutionary violence and, and justifications of revolutionary violence and sort of, you know, making the point that, yeah, these justifications make a lot of sense if you're truly committed to a kind of anti-colonial position. So if you feel uncomfortable with them, maybe that has something to do with your own kind of disjunction from anti-colonialism, right? Was what I argued at least.

44:32Patrick Jean-Baptiste Was Fanon aware of Vate's work? No, I didn't know him.

44:37Chris Bongie No. What about Sartre? Was Sartre aware? Again, not that I know of, you know, sort of somebody like Nick Nesdod, who we were talking about earlier, has, has, has made arguments that clearly draw Sartre and Vate into relation. In terms of thinking about the colonial system. It's like a phrase that they, they both use, but no, I, I, I don't actually know of specific instances. And you have to understand that, that in the mid 20th century, Vate was, was, was pretty unknown. I mean, along with just the general silencing of, of, of Haiti, you know, Vate was like doubly or, or triply silenced at that time as somebody who was kind of associated with Christophe's regime. And Christophe's regime had been, you know, placed into the shadows, marginalized, you know, by the successors of, of Pétion. Right.

45:33Patrick Jean-Baptiste Even in Haiti, right? Like historians didn't, didn't necessarily elevate him in any particular way. Right. I think you mentioned that in the book.

45:42Chris Bongie Well, yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the great mid 19th century Haitian historians, Madieu, Audun and Saint-Rémy, I mean, they have nothing good to say about Vate. You know, they had precious little good to say about Henry Christophe. And they wrote very much as the, as the sort of the fans of, of Etienne and to some extent, Boyer, right? They had a real commitment to what they call, you know, the enlightened minority. And they didn't necessarily think about the enlightened minority in purely racialized terms, the sort of light skin, dark skin, but just the enlightened minority. Those were the Haitians that, that, that counted for, for Ardouin, Madieu. And, and that kind of like left out, I guess for them, a significant percentage of the, of the Haitian population. And somebody like Vate takes that significant percentage of the population into account a little bit more than, than they're, than they're capable of doing, it might be said. But at the same time, they marginalized Vate. They, they would recognize he's like, you know, the enlightened minority, obviously, right? Books and things, but he just put his, his mind in the service of a corrupt monster from their perspective.

47:00Patrick Jean-Baptiste Professor, have we found a more just for the Salines? Because I see words like massacre. I'm not, for some reason, I'm not comfortable with that. Do we have a, a particular word for responding to, to violence as sort of a, a counterviolence? Do we, do we have a more just for that? Have we discovered one yet? That, because when we talk about massacre, it sort of, sort of collapses the, the, the violence of the colonial system with a response. As it was, and then, and then people like the Salines response to violence that was committed against him and his people. Do we have a good word for that other than it's just violence for violence? Because I think the, the, the question is in the spectrum for me.

47:46Chris Bongie Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's a, it's a very good question. A massacre is a, is a completely, you know, relative term. A massacre is always a massacre from the perspective of, of someone. I'm thinking, you know, for instance, of the, the so-called Fructidor massacre, 1796, I believe. And that was, you know, supposedly caused by Rigaud. And, you know, lots of people, 300 people were killed. Massacred was the term that Toussaint used and that Sontanax used. And that, that everybody who was sort of suspicious of Rigaud used to describe what, what, what happened in Le Quay in 17, in Fructidor 1796. And of course, you know, when Rigaud responds to that, he said, there's no massacre here. There's just, there was an unfortunate incident. And, you know, I have no, you know, responsibility for this. And it's, it's not what you're trying to, trying to represent. So that's just a kind of like, in passing, that word massacre actually does, you know, resonate in, you know, French, in, in the history of the Haitian Revolution before independence. And now who's using the word to describe whom? So I think I would just sort of go maybe to Sean Lat and Thessaline's speech of 28th of April, 1804, where they're sort of talking about these events and sort of see the kind of like language that they use to describe what had, what had just happened. It has to be said, though, that in terms of 1804, it, and it, you know, February, March, April, and this sort of campaign to, to kind of get rid of a lot of the remaining white population in Haiti, that it was a kind of uncomfortable memory. And Vaté, in his history of Haiti, just like leaves it out altogether. So he doesn't try to come up with like an alternative vocabulary. He just sort of leaves it out.

49:46Patrick Jean-Baptiste Well, which book of Jean Fouchard you, you had mentioned earlier that, that talked about the Thessaline response?

49:56Chris Bongie It's a, it's a very good question. And I'd have to go to, I'd have to go to my, my notes. I can, I can go there.

50:05Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yeah. It's not the Maude de la Liberté, is it?

50:07Chris Bongie No, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. Yeah. Hold on. Give me, give me a second here.

50:11Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yes.

50:13Chris Bongie And it's, okay, I got that. It's the theater at, theater in Sandemang. The theater in Sandemang? Theater in Sandemang, yeah. And it's, it's a book, it's a fascinating moment. Yes. Theater in Sandemang. It's a fascinating moment where he is like basically talking about, you know, how wrong people are about Dessaline. He's saying, you know, Dessaline, you know, was a very, you know, he was a good guy. He had lots of, you know, very human instincts. And as you can see from the fact that he had a positive relation to theater. I forget the exact, the exact anecdote, but Dessaline apparently saved a theater from destruction or something. Basically, Fouchard is talking about Dessaline having a very positive relation to the theater. And that somehow, I'd have to like reread the document, but that somehow, you know, segues into a kind of a defense of what happened in 1804. And here's his language, which I'm just translating. He's in the April 28th, 1804 speech. He takes upon himself, he vindicates the most noble crime of our history. This is Fouchard's language. The most noble crime of our history, this massacre of whites, which was to the glory of the liberator, a moving and courageous. Oh, okay. We don't like his choice of words. You're looking for alternative vocabulary, a moving and courageous Holocaust.

51:54Okay.

51:55Chris Bongie Well, okay. Ouch. I don't want to listen to his logic because what was assassinated were not a few thousand, you know, celera, wicked people. Dessaline is too, too great for such a little hack. What was assassinated was slavery itself. So Fouchard, you know, just makes this amazing sort of characterization of those events as the assassination of slavery itself and the most noble crime in our history. Wow.

52:31Patrick Jean-Baptiste That's flipping the script quite a bit.

52:34Chris Bongie It's flipping the script quite a bit. And, you know, what does one do with those kind of moments? Do you just sort of like leave them out? Or do you try to like learn from them and kind of read them sort of like, okay, what was the perspective that was generating, that could generate that kind of take on February, March, April 1804? Right? Because, you know, Fouchard, I mean, you know, the Maroons of Liberty. I mean, this classic text, always cited. And yet here, here is something that's a little uncomfortable. It's like a reminder for us that there's something more to Fouchard than that. Then that's something that can just be easily pigeonholed as a sort of important document for understanding, you know, Haitian culture or whatever. Here's something else. Here's a little supplement. And as a scholar, I'm kind of very, you know, maybe it's something that's wrong with me. But I'm very interested by those sort of uncomfortable reminders where people kind of go off script or where they kind of adopt, you know, unfamiliar or scripts that make us uncomfortable and weren't quite, you know, what we expected. I'm always reading people like Ardoin, you know, for those sort of moments where he kind of breaks out of his sort of straightforward role as historian of Haiti. And he makes these kind of sort of ideologically problematic, most people would say, kind of comments about the enlightened minority, for instance, right, where he kind of, you know, talks about things from reveals that he's sort of committed to this kind of perspective of the enlightened minority and that that's what's generating his history, right? And it makes us very uncomfortable to read that. But it cashes out in terms of him saying very nice things about Rigaud in places or saying sort of extraordinary things about like the revolution of the Jean de Couleur Libre in 1791 and sort of saying this was the starting point of the Haitian revolution, right? Like, oh, I thought that Bois-Caimène was the starting point of the Haitian revolution. Well, no, from Ardoin's perspective, not really, because Ardoin was still very, you know, committed to the idea that revolution, his understanding of revolution was something that had to be generated by enlightened minds, the enlightened minority, right? And to some extent, what was going on in the summer of 1791 in the western province of Saint-Domingue, the so-called, you know, insurrection or what you will, of the Jean de Couleur Libre, much more closely matched Ardoin's expectations and his sense of where Haiti came from than the slave revolt to the north.

55:33Patrick Jean-Baptiste So where do you fall on that as an historian?

55:35Chris Bongie Well, as a historian, I think that it's interesting to follow up on these kind of uncomfortable reminders or to kind of track, you know, where that comes from. And for me, in the work that I've been doing, especially since the translation of Colonial System unveiled, this has kind of taken me to some weird places where I've sort of tried to take the revolt of the Jean de Couleur Libre in 1791 seriously, not just as a kind of a sort of unimportant adjunct or supplement to the slave revolt, but as kind of what I refer to as the other 1791, the other 1791, which was based on the kind of the struggle for full civil and civic rights for free people in Saint-Domingue, but not for the slaves, right? A struggle that's associated with people like André Rigaud and especially Pierre Pachénat, who, you know, Ardoin and Madieu have great things to say about Pachénat. And it's interesting that, you know, Haitian revolutionary studies today has nothing to say about Pierre Pachénat, and yet he was looked upon as the sort of the Washington of Saint-Domingue by many people in the early 1790s.

56:59Patrick Jean-Baptiste So, when we look at the Jean de Couleur insurrection versus the Wakaima, doesn't it imply that you have to find a cause and effect, like which came first, kind of like the chicken and the egg kind of thing, for you to choose which one was the catalyst? Or did those things that, by my reading, the last three years I've been doing this, I'm having a hard time, you know, finding sort of like a consistent linear cause and effect from one event leading to another. I see a lot of times things are happening concurrently and parallel, and at other times I see a direct cause and effect. How should we think about those 12, 13 years of the Haitian Revolution?

57:46Chris Bongie Well, and that's, yeah, and maybe one doesn't have to choose between those table options, right? I mean, you can't not think in terms of cause and effect, but of course that's the way that everybody was thinking in the 1790s about, you know, how did this happen? Who are the great, and here's the introduction of a very interesting word, who are the authors of the slave revolt, or who are the authors of the problems in Saint-Domingue? Everybody's sort of looking for that root cause, and they associate it with the idea of authorship, interestingly, right? Who are the authors? And so, you know, you see all sorts of conspiracy theories that will, you know, take you from point B back to point A, and, you know, point A might end up being, oh, the whites who were the royalists, the white royalists, they were at the start of it all, and they're the ones who somehow, you know, got the slaves to revolt, and, you know, and it all didn't go the way they expected, but the royalists, or, oh, no, it all happened, it started in Wakaiman, or, you know, in fact, what happened in the northern province in 1791 was actually connected to what was going on in the western province, and, you know, you can, it's les mulatres that were the root cause of it all, for better or for worse. And so, you know, people in the 1790s were constantly looking for the root cause, trying to make these causal connections, and, you know, we today are still trying to do that, but we do have to recognize that there's a kind of genealogy there in terms of how we're thinking about things, and is it possible to think about things differently, not simply in terms of causality, but in terms of these just kind of weird coincidences or parallelisms or whatever that can direct us towards maybe a different, not so linear view of history. So you don't have to choose, but the minute you've sort of turned your focus on any one aspect of the Haitian revolution, you realize that you have to somehow take various, you know, stories, causal stories, mythologies into account because they were so important in terms of how these events were understood at the time and how we continue to understand them.

1:00:11Patrick Jean-Baptiste In what sense would you, because Vaté represented the contrast, his output, because I heard a scholar, I think it might have been Nadev Menard, who told us that there actually isn't a genre, a slave narrative for Haiti. I don't know if you're familiar with that perspective or that argument. What would you put, or is he in a category by himself in terms of his output? Like, I know I'm trying to pick things into a box. Maybe they don't belong in that box. No, no. Yeah. What category? Because the way you're talking about him is like, you know, in terms of contrast with the abolitionist movement, like he's sort of in a category by himself, right? But they try to fit him into their category. I get that. But where would you put him in terms of genre? So we can have sort of a better understanding of where you put him post, that generation, like post-revolution, post-independence, if you will.

1:01:11Chris Bongie Yeah. Well, certainly the whole question of, yeah, there's no slave narrative. Deborah Jensen, you know, made that argument pretty compellingly in her book, the title of which I'm momentarily forgetting, but which was hugely influential book in terms of helping us understand post-independence Haitian writing. It's like the privilege, the genre we privilege, the slave narrative, is nowhere to be found. It's not self-evident. But that doesn't mean that we should dismiss everything else that was written. And we just have to begin to understand that different genres are in play. And if we go beyond the slave narrative, there you go, that was the title of her work. If we go beyond the slave narrative, then we have a chance to get a better understanding of early Haitian literature. We can appreciate these texts more on their own. And once we've abandoned this kind of comparative perspective in which, you know, there's no recognizable document of the sort that Douglas might have produced in the States. There's no slave narratives per se. So there are other types of narratives. There are other genres of writing. So what are the genres of writing that Vaté is drawing on? And what are the genres of writing that he's making possible? These are great questions. There's no one answer, but, you know, for sure, he was very influenced, for instance, by revolutionary pamphlets, by the genre of the refutation. A lot of Vaté's writing, like his later political remarks, where he's just going into detail, sort of close reading, almost deconstructing the work of French writers and French journalists and what they have to say about Saint-Domingue and about Haiti and what they have to say about blackness. He's just sort of going line by line through what they have to say and refuting it, countering it. That strain of Vaté's writing is very much, it's a genre, the genre de refutation. And you can go back to the 1790s and you can see that Vaté's predecessors were practicing it. You can see that it's the fundamental genre of free colored writing, the writing of the genre de couleur libre in the early to mid 1790s. There's a whole genealogy that links what Vaté's doing in Colonial System Unveiled, different as it might be from what was happening 20 years ago, to the sort of work that was being produced in the 1790s by André Rigaud himself, refutations of colonial writing by Pierre Pachinat, and also, of course, by Jus Chanlat. And here is a kind of a fundamental point that needs to be made. You raised the question of new generations, right? The previous generation to Vaté is Chanlat's generation. Chanlat was around the revolution from the very beginning, 1791, and he outlasted everyone. You know, he died in 1828. And he was a fundamental sort of influence on the writers of post-independence Haiti, both in the South and in the North. And Chanlat is drawing on a lot of different genres, but one in particular, which he shared with other members of the genre de couleur libre in the early 1790s, is a fascination with tragedy as a genre, right? And tragedy is sort of everywhere present in what Chanlat and other gens de couleur libre, like Pachinat, like Savary, what they're writing. This is what they were reading. And this is what sort of infused their understanding of what they were doing when they revolted against colonial rule in 1791, right? They were reading a lot of Voltaire. They were reading a lot of neoclassical tragedy. And that actively infused what they were doing and how they saw themselves. And it continues to sort of infuse, to some extent, like Fouchard's representation of the most noble crime in our history. This language of the most noble crime, this is the language of neoclassical tragedy. It would have been very recognizable to somebody like Juste Chanlat. And Vathe is connected to that genealogy, but he's also taking his distance. And I would like, there was one part of the colonial system unveiled that I did kind of think about as I was preparing for this podcast. And I think it kind of gets at what you're asking there. And it has to do with passages in the colonial system unveiled that have an intertextual relation, not to European writers, which is obvious. He's citing the Abbe Grégoire. He's citing Mungo Park. He's citing lots of recognizable figures. But there are a couple of, there's one moment in the text, one key moment where he establishes a very close relationship between himself and Juste Chanlat, right? Who was also part of Christophe's court and who had produced the first sort of important book, sort of advocating for Christophe, which is called The Cry of Nature, which came out in 1810 and was dedicated to the Abbe Grégoire, right? So already sort of situating itself, you know, within the transatlantic abolition sphere. But there's a moment in colonial system unveiled in which Chanlat actually quotes more or less verbatim parts of the cry, Chanlat's The Cry of Nature. And there's so many fascinating aspects to it. It's on page 107. I don't know if you have your song.

1:07:11Patrick Jean-Baptiste You want to read it for us or you want me to? Yeah. Can I read it? Yo, please, please.

1:07:16Chris Bongie That's the best part. Okay. So he's about to launch into his inventory, right? This is one of the most stylistically, formally, the most important things about colonial system unveiled, right? Is that midway through, he just launches into this inventory of over 100 French colonists and recounting in a very matter-of-fact way all of the atrocities or some of the atrocities that they committed against the enslaved peoples who were in their power, right? And it's the thing about colonial system unveiled that everybody sort of remembers and that they recognize as just absolutely distinctive and new, you know, that the ex-colonists are being kind of brought to trial for their crimes. And these crimes are being aired in the public sphere. So it's, you know, an incredibly distinctive part of the text. And, you know, it's never been done before. But he's got receipts. Vate's got receipts. But, of course, and as he makes clear, you know, where did he get this information? He got it from, you know, a variety of sources. And one of the receipts that he's got has been handed to him by Sean Lapp. And you realize that Sean Lapp is really the inventor of this technique. If you want to talk in those terms, you realize that because the inventory is preceded by the following. Where Vate addresses a very well-known colonist called Barret de Saint-Venon, who was one of the intellectual lights of late colonial Saint-Domingue, right? He was a very enlightened man, scientific methods. He belonged to the scientific society in late colonial Saint-Domingue, the Cerque de Philadelphie. And, you know, he published books and books which were racist and despicable and easily deconstructible from a kind of anti-colonial perspective. So here's his attack on Barret de Saint-Venon. But what you have to understand is this is more or less verbatim how Sean Lapp spoke of Barret de Saint-Venon four years before in The Cry of Nature. You, above all, Barret de Saint-Venon and the despicable votaries of your cause, you dare to paint an imaginary picture of the blissful condition of the black man transported to the colonies and to assert that you have done him an essential service by tearing him away from those savage regions of the world so that he can enjoy the comforts of civilization and the benefits of your paternal administration. It suits you very nicely, you and your kind, to affect the language of humanity. You, who, as resident manager of the Dupla plantation, revived every imaginable kind of torture, buried men up to the neck, threw them into the sugar boiler along with the cane trash, cut off the tongues, ears, or legs of your victims, bound them alive to corpses that were already rotted, pinned their legs against their backs so that the blood stops circulating and the legs swell up, becoming paralyzed while putrefaction sets in. After all of this, you have the gall to maintain that the slaves' lot is preferable to that of day laborers in Europe. So, there, before he's launched into the actual inventory, here we have the first sort of item on the inventory. Barret de Saint-Venon, you know? He's not just the published author, right? He's not just the kind of enlightenment figure, and he's not just somebody who happened to be the manager of a plantation. He's somebody who did all of these unmentionable things, revived every imaginable kind of torture, bearing men up to the neck, throwing them into the sugar boiler, all of these things, right? And these are the kind of claims that characterize the inventory itself, where we learn about what, you know, over a hundred colonists sort of did to the enslaved peoples. But this is Charlotte, right? This is actually Charlotte's very language. This is all Charlotte from Cry of Nature, right? And so, what that tells you is it doesn't mean that, oh, well, Rubaté was a plagiarist or, you know, or whatever. But it gets you sort of thinking about our desire for originality, say, right? Oh, Rubaté is just, you know, creating this new genre. No, he's building on, he's drawing, just as he's drawing on an abolitionist like Abbé Frigoire, he's drawing on his colleague, Jusce Chanlatte, and in order to forge his own style, right? Which tends to be a little more direct and a little less self-consciously eloquent than Charlotte's, right? In fact, if you go back to Charlotte's original, you'll see that Vate has edited out a kind of a long sentence midway through, where Charlotte sort of says, you know, things like, oh, what a horrible light this, what a horrible light is cast by the torches of the furies, right? And starts, you know, talking in the terms of neoclassical tragedy, which were his basic sort of building block vocabulary in the early 1790s, right? The furies, right? That takes you back to neoclassical tragedy and then back to the Greeks and everything. It's a kind of European literary bit of intertextuality, and Vate gets rid of that. But everything else is Charlotte's language. And so, there's the question of originality. And why do we need this to be an original account? What difference does it make if these are Charlotte's words? You know, some people would say, well, of course, this shows that Haitian writing, Christophian writing, at least, was a collective endeavor, right? And they didn't have the same sort of sense of literature as private property that we do, or maybe that writers in the South did, right? So, you can sort of recuperate this bit of intertextual borrowing through a kind of recourse to an ideology of collective, collaborative writing, right? That these Christophian scribes weren't bogged down by a kind of individualism that is all too characteristic of the Eurocentric ideology of literature with a capital L, right? You can see how you could recuperate that act of intertextuality along those lines. I'm not sure that I buy that. But what's the proper answer? What's the proper response? And in making this edition of the colonial system unveiled, which has massive footnote apparatus, right? This is one of the things that I felt that was very useful, what I could do, what I could bring into conversation, was just to force people to confront the extent to which Vate's text is emerging out of so many intertexts, right? The particular genre, whatever it is, of colonial system unveiled is the kind of a result of a kind of dipping into, you know, many genres, including not just European genres, but genres that were in the process of, had been in the process of construction in Saint-Domingue for over 20 years, largely through the efforts of writers, the genre de couleur, associated with the genre de couleur revolt of 1791. People like Jean-Luc Pachon, people like Jean-Luc Pachon, and Rigaud. It's very interesting to think, for instance, and this is something I didn't know at the time I put this edition together, is that the first reference that I've ever come across to the unveiling of the colonial system, colonial system unveiled, it's actually to be found in a 1792 newspaper that was put together by Pierre Pachonat, right? As part of the kind of the political program of the Jean-Luc Pachonat at that moment, kind of a stressful moment in time, just before the Jean-Luc Pachonat kind of moved from a sort of tactical allegiance to royalism, to a kind of full-out allegiance to sort of republicanism.

1:15:33Patrick Jean-Baptiste Professor, what did I leave out? Anything else?

1:15:36Chris Bongie I've got more. And you see, this is where I get excited, right, by the details? I've got it. It absolutely needs to be made in relation to the co-opting of Jean-Luc Pachonat. And it's right on the paragraph above the one about Paris Saint-Denard. And this raises huge kind of questions about identity, the identity of who's writing. So listen to this. And it's powerful. He's describing slavery, enslavement. Our precarious life, subject to the whims of a barbaric master, half covered with miserable rags and tatters, gnawed by hunger, bent under the whip of a ruthless slave driver. However, we worked the land, watering it with our sweat and our blood, all to gratify the colonist's arrogant sensuality and his avarice. This is powerful, right? And again, most of it is from Jean-Luc Pachonat, right? You know, including we worked the land, watering it with our sweat and our blood. And it's kind of like all of a sudden, once you realize it's from Jean-Luc Pachonat, that just kind of reinforces the strangeness of this moment in the text where Vaté is laying claim to a kind of identity with the enslaved. And it's moments like this in the text that led some people in the 19th century, like Afro-American early print culture. You see a number of moments where they say, well, this guy must have been a slave. This guy is written by a slave, right? Otherwise, you know, what kind of sense can you make of passages like this? Now we know for sure that that's not the case, right? He's a Jean de Couleur Libre. That's the environment in which he grew up. He didn't, you know, water the land with his sweat. He came from a slave-owning family, all the more so with somebody like Juste Chanlat, right? Whose class allegiances are even more that sort of evident. So what do we make of moments like this, right? Are these moments of kind of unacceptable appropriation of someone else's identity? Or are these to be viewed, you know, more positively as the moments through which a kind of a Haitian identity is forged that takes us beyond sort of the historical divisions between the free and the enslaved? What's, and is Vate doing this differently from how Chanlat was doing it when Chanlat does this? How does it differ from when Vate does this, right? And who are we, right? And this is the huge question in post-independence Haiti. It's like, who are we? How do we define ourselves? In Colonial System Unveiled, towards the end, Vate says, you know, I'm not going to deal with generic designations of the past, you know, like free or like enslaved. We're all Haitians. That's my category. That's the generic denomination that I'm going to be working with. We're all Haitians. We're all part of this larger we. And obviously that's powerful and illuminating and has great potential for a sort of forward-looking vision of the country. But what does that mean in relation to the past that all of us have shared, right? And the differences between the existence of a relatively privileged member of the Jean de Couleur Libre and a member of the enslaved population. Differences which ought to matter. They ought to matter immensely.

1:19:28Patrick Jean-Baptiste And when he refers to we, and I'm talking about Vate, Desalé, and Christophe, the rest of them, are they thinking in terms of the whole country or just the northern region when they speak of we? Because I see that a lot, like a lot of instances where these historical figures talk about the we, even though the country was divided between north and south. Are they thinking of the whole country, whether they're occupying or running it, you know, one portion or not? What is that we?

1:20:01Chris Bongie Well, in Colonial System Unveiled, and that's another of the things that makes it a more attractive text for us now, than some of the other things that Vate wrote. There's no real difference between the north and the south. In fact, it's only ever kind of mentioned once, right towards the end of the book. And he says, you know, this is basically a distinction that's made by foreign newspapers. They're trying, you know, as always, to divide us in order to conquer us. And they're racializing the distinction. You know, they'll talk about the black north and the quote-unquote mulatto south. And they'll make all these distinctions that are trying to divide us from one another. That's the only mention of the fact that Haiti is a divided country. So when he's talking about us, he is really talking about everyone. Although at the same time, he's also talking about the north. Look what we've done. Look at the, you know, our new network of, institutional network of schools. Look at our printing presses. There are times when it's like, yeah, he's talking about the kingdom. But for the most part, he's just, you know, insisting on Haitians as Haitians from, you know, north to south. Whereas in other books, like where he's launching into, you know, polemics against Pétion and Pétion's scribes, you know, it's very much an us versus them kind of dialogue. You know, here, join us. Come and join us. You know, you don't want to be part of them any longer. Leave them behind. You know, leave your rulers behind and come and join King Christophe who can unify us as a country in a way that Pétion and his colleagues simply can't.

1:21:52Patrick Jean-Baptiste What do we know? This book was written 10 years ago. What do we know today about how Vaté died? Then you said, you know, it was contradictory. The representation of how he died was contradictory. Do we know more today?

1:22:08Chris Bongie Well, I think that you're referring maybe to the end of the biographical. Yes. Where I sort of talk about this guy who claimed to have met Vaté in 1828.

1:22:22Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yes.

1:22:22Chris Bongie Well, that's as I as I try to I make the point that that's like, you know, clearly an impossibility. As everyone knew from 1820 onward, he died about a week after King Christophe committed suicide. Right. That is is pretty much has been a known fact from 1820 onward. He was rounded up by the revolutionaries. And it's important to remember, you know, when Christophe committed suicide, it was some of his nobility who were revolting against him and wanted to take his place. Right. It wasn't Boyer who was sort of responsible for that initial kind of revolt in Capacien. Right. And yeah, so they rounded up Christophe's legitimate heir and mother of his sons and some of the key figures of the regime, including Vaté. And they basically just slaughtered them at night, I believe. And you get varying representations of Vaté on his death. People who didn't like Vaté in the 19th century said that he got on his knees and he begged to be, you know, saved and spared and that he showed lots of cowardice. And then other people say, oh, no, he was he took death like a man, you know, bravely. But he died. And then, you know, how long did it take him to die? There's one narrative that's cited in, I think, the recent biography of King Christophe that has him still kind of just just barely alive the next morning. And his body's there on the ground, just still kind of like shuddering or whatever. He hasn't quite died. Like he wasn't quite put to put to death. Right. But yeah. And then just buried in a pauper's grave or or or whatever. That's that's how he died. But there was this one anecdote of him, you know, still being alive in 1828. It was clearly his brother that this foreigner had had been talking to. And I try to do something a little bit fancy with that that anecdote. And they sort of say this is a historical mistake, but we can still learn from historical mistakes. Right. It's completely erroneous. You know, the guy, the traveler, I think it was James Franklin's is like wrong. Oh, this wasn't Vaté. He was deluded if he thought he was speaking to Vaté. But still, the way that he characterizes this other person, this who he thinks is Vaté, is is in itself revealing in all sorts of ways. And I think that speaks to, you know, what we do with Vaté, who's dead. But, you know, we reencounter him after the fact. Right. By reading his his books. And and what are we going to make of of him? What kind of writer are we going to shape him as the great, you know, precursor of black internationalism, the black Atlantic humanist as Marlena Doug does? Or are we going to come up with, you know, some other maybe a little less heroic sort of identity for him? Who are we going to make him out to to be? That's going to depend on, you know, our own politics, our own sort of ideological, the ideological dimension of our of our project and the extent to which it's not entirely, of course. You know, we have to deal with the facts as much as we have access to the facts. But those facts are going to be shaped in certain ways, narrativized in in certain ways that are going to create somebody who isn't Vaté, who is our Vaté, a Vaté for for this particular historical moment. As opposed to the the the the real life of Vaté, who died in October 1820, a very brutal death, a very brutal death, which, you know, again, can be allegorized as a sort of a symbol of the dangers of being a writer in in a politicized situation. Right. Yeah. I guess I want to talk about, you know, you inevitably think of Vaté and Mentor, you know, being killed in 1806 for their allegiance to to to to to Dessaline. Vaté is killed in 1820 for his allegiance to Christophe in 1822. D'Orfour is is killed by Boyer simply for trying to put forward, you know, some kind of arguments that that that question just how how how how great the Boyer regime is for for black people and and so on. Right. The writer is a figure in in danger. But these are also writers who who had a relation to to power. Right. Yeah.

1:26:59Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't help but think of that. They and the Christophe and Clarkson letters, I think his letter number 58 from Prince Saunders to Thomas Clarkson. And Prince Saunders is quoting, I guess, some some Haitians at the time who witnessed the tragedy, the deaths of Christophe and the kingdom in general, how basically the Haitians were like were lamenting the fact that, you know, all the promises, the schools and and and trying to bring Haiti up to on the world stage comparable, something comparable to, you know, what was going to European civilization. And that tragically ends it. I love the idea of think of the Haitian Revolution as a as a as a as a continuing project. But when you hear these countless, countless tragedies, Professor, it's kind of hard to keep hope alive, you know, sometimes.

1:27:56Chris Bongie Well, yeah. And that that that's the sort of, you know, what is the what is the value of kind of going back in, you know, in time and revisiting the Haitian Revolution or revisiting the post-independence period? And, you know, what is the what is the takeaway for us today? I think that at the end of Section 2 of my introduction, I think I put it I put it as well as I I possibly could have that approaching the Haitian Revolution and its troubling aftermath needs to be looked at not simply in terms of success or failure, fidelity or betrayal, but also as unfinalized sites of potential. As to quote Laurent Dubois, a reminder of what is possible if it happened once, perhaps it can happen again. Right. And so to to look at this this past and yeah, if it happened once, it can happen again. The good stuff. But then it's the bad stuff, too. If it happens, it can can happen again. It's not it's not so simple as just, yeah, the good stuff can happen again. And that's what we need to to to look forward to is a new Haitian Revolution or or a new Haitian government that's somehow going to kind of move forward in the way that Christophe wanted his country to move forward. And he took great steps in a very short period of time to to create that that new vision of Haiti to which he was committed. So there's that sense of kind of looking for the past for this kind of positive sort of message. But you also have to look at it for for for the other stuff that's that that's not so good and kind of think about what our relation to to to to to that stuff is, as it were. Right. And, you know, not necessarily how do we avoid it, but just that that's a part of where we are, where we're from. And and and maybe that, too, is a is a kind of a building block for something new.

1:29:53Patrick Jean-Baptiste And in some strange way, when I look at how fragile the democracy in this country is, how we could revert back, you know, perhaps, you know, quicker than we than we think with certain factions in this country. I for some strange reason, I derive hope from that. You know, I said, well, if this democracy that's been around for X number of years and I use the word democracy loosely, Haiti could have the reverse. This country might revert back to some sort of fascist system, you know, very quickly. Maybe Haiti can do the reverse. It can go back to some of its better days, you know, that is a constant swing into the pendulum, isn't it?

1:30:37Chris Bongie Well, it is. And it's also but I mean, the idea of better days is is is also it's it's so it is such a problem. Right. Like in terms of, you know, the new visibility of Christophe's regime. Right. And that had been hidden over by, you know, a century and a half of of historiography, not just European, but but Haitian historiography. It's like, you know, that's not that's that's that's that's another Haiti. That's not our Haiti. Our Haiti, you know, is the the Republic. It's it's that you on it. And it's all of that stuff that that that emanates from from there. And so the new invention to to Christophe and his regime, you know, opens up this whole sense of, yeah, of living Haitian life otherwise. And there's lots of good things to to to to sort of to look for when you're sort of scouring the Christophian past and and trying to reassemble it. And from the fragments that have been then been been left over through a kind of a historiography that is wished to overshadow it and and relegate it to the to the margins. But of course, you know, it's it's it's it's was it better days. It wasn't better days for for for a lot of the masses, you know, who were being forced to comply with the sort of the civilizational demands that Christoph was was putting on them and on his on his country. But viewed from another perspective, it was a kind of just another instance of the predatory, the predatory state. But with obviously some some things very different from from Pétion's what Pétion was doing, but a curse on both houses, you know.

1:32:12Patrick Jean-Baptiste Right, right.

1:32:13Chris Bongie But but but but but where's the house that one can live in? Right. You know, and so there's a temptation to be nostalgic at this moment as we sort of rediscover Christoph. We rediscover Vate. We rediscover, you know, cultural production in, you know, the the Dessalonian period. And in the first 20 years of of the Haitian Republic, including, you know, of the Haitian of independent Haiti, including the Southern Republic. There's a there's a kind of built in nostalgia to that to that activity that that we have to kind of recognize and maybe to some extent embrace, but also sort of self-consciously, you know, if not distance ourselves from at least remain, you know, rigorously aware of.

1:33:03Patrick Jean-Baptiste Thank you, Professor. It's been quite an education.

1:33:05Chris Bongie OK, well, yeah. And again, I'm I you can see where my passion lies. I love it. The little details and the intertextuality and then and all that that sort of stuff. But hopefully those little details at least contribute something to the to to getting a sense of the bigger picture or of what a bigger picture might might look at might look like from a certain perspective.

1:33:30Patrick Jean-Baptiste What else do you have cooking in the oven as far as output? Anything in the horizon we need to look forward to? We go in Haiti.

1:33:38Chris Bongie Some some some someday I am going to I'm going to get out my book called Phoenix Rising Race Literacy and the Emergence of Early Haitian Literature, which I've basically been working on since right around the time of the of the edition translation of Vate. And I've got I've got I've got it all mapped out in the eight chapters and I know pretty much where all the paragraphs go. And it just needs to kind of be written. Most of it is research. So I'm hoping I'm hoping I'm hoping to get that out. It's a peculiar text because I initially sort of started out thinking I'd just do a straightforward literary history of Haiti from 1804 to 1825. And for a variety of reasons, it just didn't seem that that's where my research was sort of taking me. And I questioned whether or not I'm the person to to be writing that straightforward literary history. And so instead, I've kind of ended up doing what I do best or worst from certain perspective. And I've I've really focused in on this thing that I call the other 1791. And I'm trying to think about the the Jean de Couleur Libre, the history of the Jean de Couleur Libre from about, you know, 1791 to 1795. And to think about all the ways in which they're sort of there very much as the as the kind of the the the overshadowed, the obscured point of emergence, if not origin for post-independence Haitian writing and thinking. And so I pay a lot of attention to to Pierre Pachinac, for instance, as as an absolutely seminal figure in terms of setting the agenda for a kind of a form of post-colonial Haitian thinking. And if you go to Marlena's, you know, very big intellectual history of the Haitian Revolution, you'll see that there's not a single index entry on Pierre Pachinac. And that's the kind of thing that excites me. Right. It's like, how does somebody like that get left out? If I can, you know, sort of see that he's a very vital figure, why is it we can't even begin to talk about somebody like that?

1:35:57Patrick Jean-Baptiste Awesome. So I hope to have you on again when you finally get that printed.

1:36:01Chris Bongie I'll be a very old man at that point. Oh, you. Okay. Well, I enjoyed this very, very much. And yeah, I hope I hope there's enough there that you can sort of snip together and make it.

1:36:13Patrick Jean-Baptiste Oh, yeah. There's a lot. Thank you for that. Okay. Appreciate it. Okay. Merci. Bye-bye.