Tragedy Otherwise
By Natalie M. Léger
In the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, and since becoming the first independent nation-state in Latin America and the Caribbean, Haiti has signaled a conundrum for postcolonial societies in the hemispheric Americas. Caribbean literary and theoretical treatments of the Revolution when authored by non-Haitians most often posit Haiti’s triumph (via the Revolution’s success at gaining independence and ending slavery) and failure (via the dire political and economic state of twentieth century Haiti) as a cautionary tale denoting the omnipotency of Western colonial power. Or worse, these significances forewarn what not to do with respect to governance and rebellion, as if persisting in colonial enchainment as an overseas department (for example), constitutes a political success. I am thus weary of meditations on the Revolution that implicitly figure Haitian people as powerless and am equally weary of the use of tragedy, in prosaic fashion and as a literary-philosophical construct, to facilitate this impotence.
The Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé contextualizes non-Haitian Caribbean uses of tragedy to write of Haiti when concluding a lecture on French Antillean literature. She writes in “Sketching a Literature from the French Antilles: From Negritude to Creolite,” that “The major writers of the French Antilles … were to appropriate [Haitian Revolutionary] heroes into their theater and to enrich their writings with ideas from Haitian intellectuals. … Suddenly, with the end of the Duvalier years, … [t]he stuff of myths crumbles. …. The tragedy of the boat people replaces the tragedy of King Christophe, and the distress of today’s Haiti thrusts itself on our imagination” (222). For Condé, tragedy indexes Haiti’s symbolic value in the French Antillean literary imaginary is in signifying the nation’s potent mythic content coupled with its rich literary philosophical value which is evident in the dramatic tragedies composed for the Revolution (“the tragedy of King Christophe”).
[Gina Samson, “Sous le regard des Ancêtres” (2018)]
Tragedy also signifies the political difficulties and economic devastation the nation has experienced in the twentieth century (“the tragedy of the boat people”). As such, in the literature of the French Antilles, and as in the literature of the English-speaking and Spanish speaking Caribbean, tragic drama necessarily gives way to fiction and criticism concerning the nation that is representative of tragedy’s quotidian iteration. In other words, the writing produced about Haiti from non-Haitian Caribbean writers of the twentieth century, while celebratory in some instances because of the Revolution, was also overwhelmingly desolate, catastrophic, and piteous in substance by the mid twentieth century onward. The sense making framework that tragedy provides non-Haitian Caribbean writers becomes a binary that fixes the nation and its people in two timeframes that overdetermine all others, inviting reductive presentations of Haiti and Haitians that are emblematic of triumph or calamity alone. There is no nuance, no effort needed to know—for tragedy already understands either as great or damned.
I am interested in writing tragedy and Haiti beyond such reductive sense making. This would require delinking tragedy from colonial power so that it can be understood as a political project that veils and names resistant difference. This necessitates unmooring tragedy from its common dramaturgical positioning as a genre driven by exceptional [read white] persons and deploying the term in a historicist manner. To conceive of tragedy in Aristotelian fashion or in Shakespearean fashion (among others) after the eighteenth century, is to normalize an understanding of the genre and theoretical construct as somehow removed from the imperial global constraints of white supremacy. This is a feat of abstraction that excuses the racialist violence of the white colonial project by normalizing supremacist hierarchies in all aspects of existence. [1] There is no cultural cache attached to tragedy without the appropriation of Greek and Roman culture by white Western European imperialists seeking affinity with past imperialists and empires who are just as genocidal towards others as their own empires. This is the present past of tragedy that needs to be named so scholars and artists are cognizant of how the genre and construct is meant to serve dominant power and obscure and set aside the interests of marginalized peoples, ideas, and happenings.
I wonder what tragedy could produce, creatively and critically, if it were re-signified in the manner my Haitian ancestors re-signified the pejorative “neg,” which now connotes “man” versus the slur “n**ger”. The former (neg as man) carries the history of the latter (neg as pejorative), reminding Haitians of their past and their distinct present. I want tragedy to do that same work and serve as an analytical continuum that both names (and acknowledges the resistant efforts against) the political machinations that allows the world to remain as it is—i.e., oppressively violent toward any beings constituted as different from a white human standard. My re-signification follows the scholarship of Nicole Loraux in Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning. Her work facilitates recognition how there would be no Athenian tragedy without the actions of Athenian politicians “[re-negotiating] practices of lamentation, mourning and the law within the workings of the democratic polis” (8). [2] These “re-negotiations” began with the banning of female mourning in six century BCE. Following the polis sanctioned exclusion of women from communal mourning rites, there remained but two ways to publicly express grief in Athens: tragedy and state funeral oration. Cast as an “agnostic topos within the democratic polis,” tragedy was presented as a political means in which to counter and suppress the seemingly unreasoned, emotive displays of feminine mourning. Such displays were considered “eastern (i.e., barbarian) and feminising” for all involved (30).
A historicist reading of tragedy understands that the dramatic art as practiced in Athens was a polis sanctioned male production which nonetheless actively fixes the gaze upon those whom the polis sought to suppress and silence—women, barbarians and enslaved peoples. These oppressed persons are obsessively present in tragedies via the chorus; they are visible and yet dismissible as peripheral to the plot when read by modern readers fixed on characters of exceptional standing. [3] However, tragedy, when read with awareness of the other, refuses the amnesia that the political project of remembrance requires. It does not allow viewers to forget those through whom the polis constituted and re-constitutes itself. In this respect, tragedy can be engaged as a gendered construct that names agents of liberation who are denigrated and obscured via reductive abstraction because they cannot serve the interests of dominant power.
I suggest that we build from the work of Loraux and other classists to untether tragedy from its imperial appropriation as a sign of white cultural supremacy in the colony, and instead deploy the tragic as a sociogenic genre, one that can tend to the obscured persons, positions, and stances that challenge a colonial existence while simultaneously being obscured. Much like the Athenian women, barbarian others, and enslaved peoples poignantly subtending Athenian tragedy’s origins and performance practices, the unruly persons and perspectives critically defiantly of white colonial power are regarded as tangential to the story of colonialism, slavery, and Western imperialism. Yet, colonized persons and their radical anti-colonial ideas have constructively shaped how colonial power operates through centuries of resistance.
Tragedy can be useful to signal this resistance and the powerful political praxis that makes this resistance difficult to discern. Indeed, when tragedy is properly understood as the supremacist political project it was, we can come to see how it remains a likeminded political praxis today; and, in this respect, it can come to serve as a gendered analytic by which scholars of the Caribbean, the postcolonial, and black studies can generatively make sense of Haiti and Haitians. It is also this sense of tragedy that I hope to capture in my book, Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Decolonial Imagination (November 2023), which is a literary study of decolonial liberation and Haitian exception. We must begin to clear away the remnants of a colonial tragic and fruitfully attend to the persistent linkages between the Haitian Revolution, Haiti, and tragedy in Caribbean cultural thought.
Notes
[1] Timothy Reiss writes that colonial “notions [of tragedy] have ruled Western thinking on tragedy since the late eighteenth century.” See “Transforming Polities and Selves: Greek Antiquity, West African Modernity,” Ed. Rita Felski. Rethinking Tragedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 264. The canonical non-Haitian Caribbean writers of twentieth century Haitian revolutionist fictions I treat in my research include C.L.R James, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and Édouard Glissant. I find that they use tragedy to make sense of Haiti and its revolution, at the expense of alternative dramas and philosophies, because of the republican framework through which they understand the Revolution. This framework reads the Revolution as a liberal democratic event that consequentially absents the political power of Saint Domingue’s captive populace (whose decolonial horizon was African inspired) from their literatures of the Revolution. See Jean Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History. This framework also obscures and/or discounts the radical anti-colonial political praxis of former revolutionary general turned emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who ruled Haiti from 1804-1806. As a result, a republican frame of reference digests the Revolution and Haiti through discourses and dramatic traditions, like tragedy, that relay human progress in Western cultural terms to underscore the failure of the Revolution: the breadth of the Revolution was liberal democratic (when envisioned through revolutionists like Toussaint Louverture) but the civil period of early Haiti (1806-1820) and the political instability of twentieth century bore only despotism.
[2] This reading is heavily indebted to Nicole Loraux’s Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy, Trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) and Mothers in Mourning, Trans. Corinne Pache, (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1998).
[3] The classist Page duBois argues that once scholars of antiquity shift their gaze from characters —from the great man and woman and later the every(wo)man of more recent interpretations of tragedy and thus from “the split, suffering self” of the modern —they can begin to see the “haunting” presence of women, slaves and barbarians within tragedy. See “Toppling the Hero: Polyphony In the Tragic City,” Ed. Rita Felski. Rethinking Tragedy, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008) 135, 136.
References
Condé, Maryse. “Sketching a Literature from the French Antilles: From Negritude to Creolite.” Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature. Ed. Timothy Reiss. Trenton: African World Press, 2002.
Taxidou, Olga. Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Dr. Natalie M. Léger is an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University who specializes in anti-blackness and anti-colonial thought and decolonial philosophy in Caribbean literature and hemispheric American fiction. She received her PhD in English Literature from Cornell University in 2011, completed an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tufts University in 2014 and was a 2016-2017 Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship Recipient. Her research interests focus on race and visual culture, African diasporic literature, and magical realist cultural production.