Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, lawyer and product of colonial Martinique and Saint-Domingue whose Description of the French and Spanish parts of Hispaniola, of epic length, is of great importance to scholars. His writing so far strikes me as essentializing different racial groups in Saint-Domingue as well as thought-provoking for his commentary on social relations, dance, Vaudoux, and the cities and towns of the French colony. Apparently he is a relative of Josephine, wife of Napoleon. I recently read The Civilization That Perished, which is an abridged and translated copy of his aforementioned work. Anyway, the following are some enlightening things about Saint-Domingue, future Haiti.
1. Although lacking universities like the Spanish colonies, cities such as Le Cap (Cap Francais) featured a Royal Society of the Sciences and Arts and other learned organizations, including an active theater scene, where seating was racially segregated, of course. Slaves were around 2/3 of the population of Le Cap, about 10,000! Port-au-Prince, though made the capital of the colony, was described as a "camp of Tartars" by Moreau de Saint-Méry and seen as lacking the splendor, design, and feel of a more capable and beautiful city, such as Le Cap. In addition to theaters and schools of reading, writing, and arithmetic, colonial cities were tied to the Atlantic world's commerce, via trade with British colonies, Curacao (particularly Jacmel), and other parts of the world. The global economy was becoming more and more connected, and one can see such a phenomenon in Saint-Domingue, where free women of color and slave women wore Madras cloth and (the more fortunate, that is) finer materials from Persia and India. The prospect of learning in Saint-Domingue seemed to have been worsened by the expulsion of the Jesuits in the mid-18th century. With men such as Father Boutin, they were responsible for studying African languages as well as proselytizing among the slaves.
2. Slave culture among African and Creole slaves in Saint-Domingue reveals the deep divisions and gaps in understanding between slaves of different origins. According to Moreau de Saint-Méry, Creole slaves referred to African-born slaves as "horses" or beasts of burden as an insult, and looked down upon them. He also claims that Negroes born in the colony gradually gained less "Negroid" features over time and seems to favor slavery for showing "domestication's" beneficial impact on blacks. Needless to say, such sentiments are highly disturbing and racist, and even though the author abhorred the treatment of pregnant slaves or the blind prejudice against free people of color, his own slaveholding personal interests are never mentioned.
3. He does describe "Vaudoux" as a dance and snake cult from what is now Benin, as well as the chica and calenda dances of slaves. Their skills as musicians also deserve mention, particularly in drums, violins, the banza, as well as their interest in European dances such as the minuet. Overwhelmingly, the portrait of blacks, particularly those from Africa, is one of superstitious, lazy, stupefied by European manufactured products (such as mirrors), poor with arithmetic and unable to give their precise age, ignorant, feeble-minded, polygamous, careless, and thieving. He also claims that 1/4 of all blacks sold into slavery from Africa were accused of witchcraft, the blacks worship fetishes (crude wooden statues, which sound like nkissi figures from Central Africa), the Creole slaves were smarter and preferred for domestic and skilled labour, mulatto slaves were almost exclusively domestic and considered themselves above blacks, and the Africans who spoke about their homeland loved it. He goes on to say that Negroes were capable of full emotions and some showed complete loyalty to their masters, as well as defending the Creole/Kreyol language as better-suited than French for expressing certain things. Interestingly, slaves of Amerindian origin were also illegally present in Saint Domingue, from Natchez, Lousiana, Canada, Guianas, the Caribs, and elsewhere. As mentioned previously, woman’s headdresses were important; slave women loved undergarments and muslins from India/Persia and slave women shared clothes. I am surprised no one has researched clothing and dress among slave women and free women in Saint-Domingue, it sounds like an understudied but fascinating field for elucidating constructs of gender, class, status, and style in a colony where opulence and excess are always referenced.
4. Some of the problems of today's Haiti clearly arose in the colonial period. Soil erosion, for instance, was already severe by 1791. Epidemics of smallpox and other diseases, as well as earthquakes struck Saint-Domingue, too, including one that destroyed Port-au-Prince in 1770. Droughts, soil exhaustion, epidemics, and earthquakes made the profitable colony of Saint-Domingue a dangerous place and suggests a precarious future. Perhaps this is why Fumagalli asserts that Moreau de Saint-Méry and other French Saint-Dominguans envisioned taking over Spanish Santo Domingo to expand the plantation complex into the eastern half of the island. With increasing soil exhaustion and a sense of impending ecological doom from the plantation system within the small French colony on the island, expansion into Spanish Santo Domingo would be a rational decision. These issues also illustrate how the independent nation of Haiti inherited problems from European colonial destruction of the environment, which has worsened conditions for the independent states of the region. In my opinion, too often has this fact been conveniently 'forgotten' as a contributor to soil erosion, deforestation, and other signs of environmental change.
Naturally, one should be skeptical of many of de Saint-Méry's claims, particularly on the slaves, given his biases and prejudice as a slaveholder himself. However, his text is excessively detailed and informative on the economic, urban, rural, social, environmental, racial, and cultural factors at play. One should read his text with an open mind and analyze some of the postcolonial legacies inherited by Haiti, particularly how the color/caste system created the conditions under which Saint-Domingue would perish as well as those through which it would linger in Haiti.
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