Whenever I hear 1804 Haitian fanatics—those who shout with fevered breath about the glories of the Haitian Revolution, about the unshakable will of Christophe, the unbreakable fire of Dessalines, the brilliant tactical and strategic maneuvers of Louverture—I think about something James Joyce once wrote, something about heroism and the lie that holds it together:
“Do you not think the search for heroics damn vulgar? I am sure however that the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie and that there cannot be any substitute for individual passion as the motive power of everything.”
And maybe he was right. Maybe all the grand statues, all the history book renderings of haitian men and women who lived and fought and bled—maybe they were always meant to obscure something harder to face: that there are no perfect person, no unblemished saviors, no mythic warriors who moved through the world without doubt, without error, without contradiction. That the stories we Haitians tell ourselves, the way we flatten our historical figures into marbles, the way we sand off their edges, all of it is less about truth and more about our comfort.
That’s what struck me reading Dr. Marlene Daut’s “The First and Last King of Haiti.” It isn’t a portrait built for worship. Christophe emerges not as an untouchable legend but as a man—a man who built, a man who ruled, a man who inspired (and also a man who made shitloads of mistakes), who punished, who carried the weight of the impossible on his shoulders. There is no neat symmetry to his life here, no easy moral at the end. But there is something real, something tangible. There is a man who shaped history and was, in turn, destroyed by it.
And this is where I think Joyce and the 1804 purists miss each other. Heroism, as an idea, is flawed because we are all flawed. But Haitian history does not belong to those who refuse to see the fullness of its historical figures. It belongs to those Haitians who can hold contradiction, who can see Christophe not as some distant legend but as a man who, for all his flaws, left something behind that still stands.
And maybe that is the only kind of heroism worth anything at all.
(The interview with the author is currently in post-production.) Stay tuned!
