Thank you very much for that, for that introduction, David.
Before I begin my lecture, and I want to first apologise for those in the audience for the double image that you see on the screen.
That wasn't intentional. Since this happened then, and I thank everyone who was trying to help me resolve it, but I've been since it happened,
I was thinking of an appropriate David Nicholls comment to make about the double image.
And for those of you who know from wrestling to Duvalier, no Nichols very famous comments in the preface of it,
when he talks about a Haitian historian who he stayed with in Port-Au-Prince while he did his research,
and the Haitian historian wrote to him and said, you forgot your unit clear when you went back to England,
meaning that he had seen Haiti in these two different sides.
So not a perfect segue into this, but it will work for the purposes of today.
I'm very, very grateful to to be here and to be able to speak with you.
It's a great honour for me to be presented the 21st David Nicholls Memorial Lecture,
and so I thank David Howard and members of the David Nicholls Trust for extending to me this this honourable invitation.
It's very special to me personally to be delivering this lecture because David Nicholls work meant a lot to me at a very early stage in my career.
Way back in the end of the last century, in the 1990s, when I started to develop a scholarly interest in Haiti,
it was the Nicholls work that I turn to very early on.
So it was something very,
very personal to me that that journey and more than any other work that Nicholls published and this is not just the books but the essays,
the articles and all of the, the output that he, he, he, he really sort of shared with the world on, on Haiti its past and up to the 1990s.
But more than all more than all of that it was from Destiny to Duvalier that had the most sort of profound impact on me.
It was one of the required books for reading on Haiti for anyone serious with understanding Haitian history.
And it was a starting point, I believe,
for a sort of investigation of a generation of scholars that looked at Haitian history after its first appearance.
And I will say this I don't think the book has had the sustained respect it deserves.
I think now as as a scholar myself of Haiti, as a as a professor of Haitian history,
I've lamented the fact that it doesn't appear as frequently as it should on reading less on Caribbean history and Haitian history.
And in some ways, that's a tribute to the vast outputs of scholarship on Haiti since the 1990s.
And another other ways,
I think that the richness and the insights that that book put forward still deserve to be grappled with by students of Haiti today.
In the 1970s, when much of distilling to Duvalier was researched and written,
Nicholls took readers away from the view of Haiti as a case of pathological self-destruction,
a perspective that seemed to guide far too much of what was being written about the Republic.
There's a whole sort of genealogy of that sort of writing that one can can find going back to the 19th century travel literature and coming
down by insisting on Haitian decolonisation as part of a battle between conflicting ideas of what the Haitian state could and should be.
Nichols, in many ways stood alone, even if his conclusions drew criticism.
Few could take issue with his methods and the rigour by which he set about his task and is not to be taken lightly.
The fact that Nicholls was able to look and send to really Haitian sources at a time in which many non Haitian writers were not
privileging Haitian sources in reconstructing the Haitian past and his many trips to Haiti and his his research in private libraries,
I think really are a testament to that. It is also significant, as the late Trinidadian scholar of Haiti, Michael Dash,
once remarked that Nicholls was based in Trinidad, employed at the UW Y when he began to work through the ideas of the book.
Trinidad was, it must be remembered,
the place where Celia James first avowed to write a book on the Haitian Revolution that would become his magisterial, the Black Jacobins in 1938.
There is something very important here in the way the process of Anglophone political decolonisation
and the discussion over independent nationalism forced a reconsideration of the Haitian model.
James wrote about Haiti at the start of that process in Trinidad and Nichols just after its completion in the 1960s.
The struggles over black consciousness and governance in the former British colonies were very much alive in the decade.
Nichols worked on the book and no doubt had some impact on how he viewed Haiti's past.
And he makes several references to the scene in from that scene to Duvalier, but more so in later works of Haiti and Caribbean context.
In particular, the conclusions he drew are now classic race and colour have been dividers of effective national independence in Haiti.
But this cannot be determinative.
And Nichols, in the revised edition of the book in 1996, acknowledged a difference in social and political power of colour and race.
In my own work on Haiti,
I have argued for close attention to the peculiar implications of colour and race at various points in time in the Haitian past.
This is, in a sense, adding nuance to the argument. But what is significant is the larger point Nichols makes about the brittleness of power in Haiti.
Changes both internally and imposed from outside, can reshape the material structure of Haitian power and cause further distress for Haitians.
And once that process begins, the past itself becomes redefined in light of it.
It is in the preface to the revised edition that Nick Nichols, I think, best captures this point of his argument.
He acknowledges that the deflation of end of Duvalier's optimism after 1986 and the Duvalier dictatorship
fell and the splintering of the Duvalier's explanation of the Haitian path altered Haiti's trajectory.
In his review of Haitian history from 1979, the year of the first publication of Dissident to Duvalier to 1996,
he was keen to not force his model as an explanation of the crisis after Aristide's first overthrow in 1991.
But to present Haiti as a state of new tensions connected yes to the past.
But at the same time, exploring newer measures of correction as Nichols concluded, quote, What are the prospects for the future?
Changes in Cabinet offices and speeches of self-styled presidential candidates hit the headlines.
But the real life of Haiti goes on.
The manifest weakness of the government has also led to an increase in crimes of crimes of robbery and violence, end quote.
And this is a telling comment about the way in which you see a different sorts of creation of violence.
It's not the violence of the Duvalier estate and the Macoutes,
but a different type of violence that still was a bit too young in the mid-nineties when Nicholls wrote this.
But it was something that was notable.
The legacy of all the troubles of the Duvalier is past was effectively covered in nicol's descriptions of contrasting
murals on Port-Au-Prince walls and the provocative cover of the new edition of the book From There selling to Duvalier.
Now, if we consider the changes in the new appearance of the book, here's a 1979 edition.
And here is the 1996 one. The 1979 cover image is very much a story of the triumph of the Haitian Revolution,
the triumph of the freed men and women who marched stoically to overcome French colonialism.
This tells a very different story. It's a different history of Haiti that is highlighted there.
Yes, the revolution is present in the the figure of the man sat in the chair in the in the gingerbread house.
But that person is wearing dark glasses, a routine costume for the Tonton Macoutes, then in jeans and carrying a sword.
It seems as if this image in many ways is pointing to the way in which the presence of the Duvalier era has or takes or uses,
or even in fact recreates a Haitian past to serve its own ends.
And in many ways, I think that's that captures a lot of what I see as a major contribution and lasting contribution of nickel's work.
But it is nevertheless crucial for those of us charged with the duty of revisiting
that Haitian past to do as Nicholls did and encouraged to evaluate it.
In terms of the present in the onetime colony of San Domingue,
that has come to be known by an interminable set of mostly pejorative suffixes the poorest country in the world, poor Haiti,
the Magic Island, the land of revolutions there in the middle of the western end of the universe of the Caribbean,
Haitian national independence has been redefined many times over.
It is the independence of Papa Dessalines that Haitians celebrate freedom from French colonialism in 1804.
Emancipation from slavery and freedom to determine its own interpretation of race and nationalism, which would be expanded across the Americas.
19th century Haitian writers spent much time interrogating this type of freedom.
And David Nichols devoted a good bit of his intellectual work to show how they did so.
One need only examine the works, the works of Edmond Paul and in our film and compare them with their inheritors.
Michel Actor John Kazimir. To see how constant this process of redefining Haitian freedom and race is and the great
disservice we make to Haiti when we apply conventions and interpretations from outside.
Haitians. Self conceptions of race have always been guided by history and moments of great change.
When Haitians might refer what Haitians might refer to as normal or belong can only be appreciated in context and chronology,
as those terms do not travel unaffected through through time or are not reshaped by internal conflicts.
Now, today, in 2023, a whole new social tension exists from the one that Nichols assessed in the nineties.
The horror in Port au Prince, where major sectors are choking under the grip of gang violence.
Seems almost incomprehensible.
Evacuees from the violent areas are trying with fierce desperation to find a different type of freedom, a freedom just to live.
It is, to be sure, a Caribbean problem. Gangs, guns and their trail of pain outline daily life in most islands of the Caribbean today.
But in Haiti, it is most distressing because of the scale and because of the inability of political containment.
Scholars of Haiti, myself included, struggle to find purchase on this situation and quite often missed the mark when asked to explain it.
We cannot do so satisfactorily, I argue, because we cannot truly understand what the purpose of this violence is,
what it might take to stem it, or more disturbingly, the tremendous effect it is having on Haitians today and for years to come.
And indeed, what we're seeing in Haiti today with the gang violence is going to affect generations of Haitians to come.
We often lean to the past for answer for answers.
We denounce foreign intervention with good reason. French colonialism brought violence slavery in the 18th century, US occupation,
the 20th seeded deep internal divisions and 21st century UN peacekeeping spread cholera and left little traces of stability.
And today, a proposed Kenyan intervention has aroused considerable debate against foreign occupation or presence in Haiti.
These are important insights,
but they are defining our current situation of uncontrollable violence that seems carried out by mainly younger and younger males,
where contexts of past conflicts simply do not apply.
What are the prospects for the future of Haiti?
Nicholls asked in 1996. And it was a question that embraced the possibility of parliamentary democracy
and a national effort to expunge the lingering vestiges of Duvalier ism.
But we are some distance now from all of that.
Haiti in 2023 is not the Haiti of 30 years ago or 20 years ago, with the second Aristide coup or even the Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
It has to be faced by a whole new set of terms, as perplexing as the prospect may be to identify them.
This is not to say discussing Haiti from the perspective of its past has no value.
Far from it. The past is always necessary because it holds the aspects of Haitian life and evolution
essential to knowledge of the present and that journey from enslavement to freedom.
And the Haitian past cannot be seen neatly as one of on broken exploitation.
As is so often the case.
I wonder if there are other countries whose 220 years of national life are so glibly summarised in news reports of its present problems.
That sort of approach, even by persons with great sympathy for Haiti,
overlooks the remarkable history of the country and what it has given the world after 1804.
What I am suggesting is that the Haitian pass is best approach as being always in motion and reshaped by how we observe its present.
To get to some of this nuance, the scholar must spend a great deal of time with the records of an older Haiti, and at the same time,
as Nichols demonstrated in in that preface to the revised edition, cast eyes closely on the responses to what is occurring presently.
This is not unusual, I admit, but it is much more acute in the Haitian case, because we are even when we because even when we probe,
profess and pronounce, we're always catching glimpses of something rather than fully seeing what it was.
The massive expansion, the historiography of the Haitian Revolution,
or the new exciting work being done on the 19th century when taken together humbly, remind us just how far we have come.
Since the since the period of the 1970s when a generation of Haitians were writing.
It is my contribution this evening. To that process.
Of looking at the past and considering the present by supporting the project of re-examination
of what we know about an early Haiti and focusing on a period of Haitian history,
I've spent a great deal of my career living with the 1940s.
My fascination with 1940s Haiti stemmed from how terribly misunderstood it had been.
It was long treated by non Haitian writers as a prelude to the dictatorship of Duvalier in 1957 and its extreme rule in the 1960s.
Nichols was a notable departure from this tendency, seeking, as he saw it,
to explain Duvalier ism by closely investigating its ideological antecedents and approach that has influenced my own.
But Nichols himself, given the scale and the scope of his work and the sharp analysis of ideology and political power
did not treat as effectively or as thoroughly with the cultural tensions that lay beneath.
Political context for power in Haiti, especially in the 1940s and far from being marginal, the 1940s,
a major moment in which Haitian notions of freedom and emancipation and liberty were redefined in popular and intellectual spaces.
It was in that it was in that decade that some of the most contentious interpretations of Haitian history and
the place of race in its internal and external relations were penned by writers such as Etienne Charlier,
Dawsonville and Duvalier himself, in partnership with Long Journey,
but is especially useful to consider is that it was a period of crisis that compelled
new strategies of his generation who which wish from it a different Haiti to emerge.
The pivot of the 1940s. And this is something that that is very much pointed out in the timeline of how
we understand Haiti after your saw was a revolutionary moment of January 1946.
It was called a revolution by the people who made it.
Mostly initially students from the Haitian University, and then expanding from there to a core group of people,
labourers, high school students and the general population, not only in Port au Prince, but in provincial areas.
This was different from the revolution that led to independence.
It is also different from the use of the term revolution in Haiti's long 19th century, when new military leaders,
eager to call themselves revolutionaries, use the word frequently to define their overthrows.
And. Almost every moment.
You have an overthrow in Haiti in the 19th century, straight to 1915, was always referred to in official correspondence as a revolution.
Revolution in the fever of 1946 meant an end to neo imperialism.
It meant an end to dictatorship. It meant a vision of Haitian democracy.
It meant a new way of seeing race, nationalism and colour.
But even these aspects of the political conflict change.
In the months and years following the protests of January 1946.
The statement of radical youth that ignited the spark of 19 of January 46 drew on French resistance,
the Spanish Civil War and Haitian history in defining how it saw what was at stake in Haiti at that time.
And here is the the celebrated appearance of a text in the student paper, LaRouche, that appeared in its New Year's edition in January 1st,
1946, which is Haitian Independence Day, in which it eagerly talks about 1946 as the year of liberty, of the triumph of true democracy.
And of course, this is important coming after the war. About to leave Franco.
Vive la. Long live the youth. Long live democracy in action.
Long live social justice. Long live the world proletariat.
Long live. 1804. So this is really a key moment and it is from this that we get.
The ousting of President Eli Lesko, the gentleman in the centre here just seven days after the the student protests began.
And you get this mass national protest against not only the Lesko government,
but what many interpreted the the Lesko government to sort of symbolise, which is foreign control of Haiti at that time.
So 1946 is a crucial moment. The end result of much jostling, negotiating and fighting was the election of Dumas's Estimé,
a black deputy from the Reds in August of that year, and the excitement of 1946 led its supporters to label it a dawn of a new freedom.
And in fact, in the language of the times, it was seen as a new independence.
The entire history of the country up to that point was portrayed quite different by the generation of 1946.
Duvalier, in the mid forties, famously wrote that, quote, 1804 was an evolution.
This is a revolution and quote. In explaining the factors that led to the revolutionary moment of 1946 and all that energy that carried it.
I have in earlier work put forth several factors that ranged from ideological conflicts between black nationalists
and socialists to a wartime radicalism that rejected perceived dictatorial tendencies of President Lesko,
as we saw in the LaRouche advert earlier.
I wish, however, to give my focus this afternoon to one which has a lot of relevance to how we see Haiti today.
The role of intervention. The United States had occupied Haiti from 1915 to 34, and in the years after military withdrawal,
the United States continued to not only hold powerful political influence over Haitian affairs.
Let's Go had been ambassador to the United States prior to becoming president in 1941, but also determined the economic direction of the country.
1946 was, in the moment, treated as a response to the failure of the post occupation decade to protect Haiti from US racism,
control and economic and political interference.
As one radical puts it, in 1946, men of 1934 you have lost.
We will not lose. 1946. Now,
what were the specifics of US imperialism that so incensed the Haitian progressives
who would eventually lead the country after estimated coming to power,
especially in that critical period between estimates coming to power in 46 and the coming to power of Duvalier in 57,
what was it that was so deeply upsetting?
The most determinative feature of the 1940s insofar as foreign intervention and economic
control was concerned was the establishment of a massive project of rubber planting in Haiti.
Now, here you see for those of you who were curious why rubber is in the title, here is the answer.
It was under the aegis of a corporation referred to as the Societe Eternal American Pool, a development that we call.
Or more commonly known by its acronym, Shada.
The basic facts around the shadow robot project indicates something incredibly ambitious,
not only for Haiti, but for the entire Caribbean at the time.
In the war years, the Caribbean support for the allies, most typically included by the service, as in the British West Indies,
who joined the British Army or NGO strategic arrangements, the Lend-Lease contracts that led to bases in Chicago,
Ramos, Trinidad and Vernon Field in Jamaica was part of that.
But Shadow was much more than this because it involved the plan not just to extract space people or produce from the Caribbean,
but to put in place long term agricultural development for Haiti.
The plan arose when the blockade of the Pacific made it impossible for the United States to get rubber supplies from Asia.
The Cut-off compelled the United States to look elsewhere for much needed rubber.
Rubber for tires. Rubber for boots. Rubber for raw material.
Haiti had previously been surveyed in the early 20th century by Belgians,
who determined it was highly suitable for growing heavy and possibly crypts to go rubber,
a vine from which a form of latex would be extracted and then produced into rubber.
By the autumn of 1941, Sharda was established and developed quite rapidly.
It must be stress just how enormous this undertaking was with a US $5 million loan from the EXIM Bank.
The Haitian state gave a 50 year monopoly to shadow 150,000 acres of pine forest, and 25,000 acres were devoted for sorry of pine forests,
went to shadow for rubble, and 25,000 acres went for sisal production for for making rope.
The largest effort was the land devoted for capacity, which was a total of 67,603 acres.
This means, therefore, that what land once occupied with sugar and coffee cultivation in the 18th and 19th century was
now under the control of shadow for this massive undertaking of a new plantation agriculture.
There were five regional divisions across the country, each with ten farms at its height, shot at a total of 92,000 Haitian employees.
To break this down a little bit further. If successful, Shadow would have achieved something that Haiti had not seen since independence.
Mass production of favourable products such as sisal from the plantations, food crops such as spices and fruits,
lumber from the pine forests and most of all, rubber for the war effort that could then.
Many of the optimists hoped generate a new export commodity for Haiti in rubble.
From the vantage point of August 1941, the possibilities for Haiti to modernise was very real.
Haiti could displace Malaysia in the post-war world and become a leading global supply of latex for less coal.
The presidents who came to power in May 1941. This potential was incredibly alluring.
Haiti could move leaps and bounds above its Caribbean neighbours and Latin America.
Unsurprisingly, he gave Shadow a ringing endorsement.
And this is a quote from. In the summer of 1941,
I proclaimed once more the total desire of our government to put at the disposal of shudder all the land which it may
need for the cultivation of the strategic produce necessary for the war efforts of our great friend the United States.
Even if in order to do it becomes necessary to tighten our belts and to neglect the cultivation of all the produce.
For us. Just as for all the United Nations, there can only be one task when the war and court.
Now less goes. Position here requires a little bit more explanation.
The war had negative effects on economic dependent states such as Haiti.
There was a crisis on the horizon that Haitian exports, such as coffee, would be reduced if the US, its greatest ally, went to war.
Shada was a relief to a problem that seemed to be drawing closer support from Port au Prince.
Support from Washington. Encouraged and fuelled the Shah to project.
The president of Chada was appointed in August 1941.
A man from Kentucky named Thomas Dudley Finnell was charged with the enormous responsibility of overseeing this entire operation.
And now here are some images of just how extensive the shadow operations were.
I think it's important to note before I proceed that what you'll be seeing from this part of the
presentation through is from private archives of the shadow operations that I was given access to.
And I'm working through those records now which have actually contributed to my own revision
of Haiti in the 1940s and the significance of Shadow and how much effort was put into it.
What is clear from my review of the documents so far is that shadow was far more significant than historians have given credit.
It was unprecedented in its reach and scale and could very well have transformed Haiti's foreign exports and led the country to a different future.
As I hope to make clear in the remaining time of this lecture is that shadows collapsed four years after it began Law,
a sorry, four years after it was launch was due not to rapacious intentions of either let score for no.
As has often been stated, but to the contingencies of the 1940s, the backdrop that created it,
the abrupt US policy changes to antediluvian processing methods of rubber and to the decentralisation of its operations.
Fornals papers, which I have looked at,
reveal that he was convinced that Shadow would function with as little disruption as possible to Haitian farmers.
Lesko may have promised as much land as shadow needed.
But Finnell insisted that whatever land was taken from the Haitian farmers was rented with an understanding that should the project fail,
the plots would revert to the original holders. The farmers would in turn be employed to work on the shadow lands for pay.
Fennell's position on this was no doubt influenced by his time in Haiti.
Prior to the Shadow project being launched.
He was in Haiti since 1939,
working at the agricultural school in Haiti to help develop new methods of agricultural development in core subsistence crops.
Before that, he worked as a horticulturalist in Florida.
In these two years, he had worked closely with Haitian peasants and agronomists on projects intended to increase agricultural production.
This work involved a good bit of time spent with the Haitian peasantry observing their techniques.
It was Fennell who saw the crypts. The crew saw the corpses of a rubber project as an opportunity.
To do more than plant rubble, but an effort to transform Haitian agriculture and and lift the country out of its poverty.
And there's a lot in this early material, both from the Haitian Department of Agriculture and from charter records itself,
that that really point to this this idea. There's this sort of united view.
That shadow could have been an answer to Haiti's economic problems.
As he puts it himself. And this is taken from from the first report that Finnell filed in 1942, quote,
Hate is one of the most economically depressed countries in Latin America.
Yet Haiti is so full of opportunities, both agricultural and industrial,
that the sort of management is embarrassed by its unwillingness to do more than can be properly, properly administered and financed and quote.
Farnell oversaw the building of roads and electricity and water projects to the largest Saada areas in the Golden Valley and bayou in the north.
The corporation even purchased a former railroad station with the intention of reviving and expanding rail transports in Haiti,
which have been largely defunct in the decade before.
For now, travel to the United States. Excited by the early promise of his corporation carrying samples of essential oils.
Ginger, Haitian cacao.
The last he took to the Hershey Chocolate Corporation in the US, hoping that Haiti could become a new supplier of chocolate for the United States.
In a private letter from 1943, a visitor from the US Agricultural Department was enthusiastic with what he found.
He said, quote, The more I see of the operation, the more convinced I am that it is the sorry,
the more convinced I am that it is well conceived and executed.
Nothing like it in the magnet in this magnitude has ever been undertaken in tropical agriculture.
If Tom, referencing Finnell, is left until late fall alone, left alone until late fall, he will have his acreage planted.
Planted meddling from Washington could ruin it now.
And. This is an important admonition that came just at the apex of trips that the planting rubber planting
was introduced to shutter operations in 1942 and came to dominate the entire production line.
Nowhere before had such massive planting of it. Of this kind had been done, and Finnell and his board were well aware of the risks.
As much as Lesko was hopeful of the potential,
the US Rubber Reserve Company and Board of Economic Warfare asked for an increase in focus on the new rubber project.
And so all attention was now being directed to that. But at the same time, there were other projects for rubber development in the United States.
The plant was was particularly centred in Gonaives, in Haiti.
And at the time in 1942, when this has been unravelled, there was no perceived end to the war.
The US Robo Reserve Company was preparing for at least another 3 to 5 years for the provide provision of crucial rubber supplies.
By the following year, 1943, crypto plantations were introduced at capacity and buyer, and by the summer there were plantations across six divisions.
And at the end of the year there were a total of 45,000 Haitian labourers working on robo planting.
It was at this point of widening that the feared Washington interference that I mentioned just previously came.
The rubber development company had, with the effort in Haiti also been expanding rubber supplies in the United States and elsewhere.
Synthetic rubber was successful in the US in 1941.
The US produced 231 tons of synthetic rubber.
Heavy investment with petrochemical industries and university chemists and labs revolutionised production.
At the same time, Finnell was putting thousands of Haitians to work on the plantations in northern Haiti.
By 1944, the United States was producing over 70,000 tons of of synthetic rubber.
In February 1944, a delegation from Washington visited Haiti and immediately terminated the Cripps.
It's a contract. Fennell was directed to return all land to Haitian tenants.
The shock of this was hard for all who had believed in. Sharda Vesco begged Washington to reconsider.
Aware of the damage it would cause to his government, his Minister of Agriculture, Morris Da Teague,
also wrote several letters to Washington asking, Please do this in a graduated way of ending.
Don't do this abruptly. Farnell took this outcome as a personal betrayal.
He knew that the real reason was that US robot developers now wanted to protect us.
Robert from overseas competition. Within months, all equipped sets of geo plantations were burned and cleared and the land returned.
Some, Robert, continue to be grown in buyer and sizeable production continued.
The US government gave us $175,000, which works out to be roughly US $2.8 million in 2020.
Three figures for rehabilitation of families displaced on lands that were turned over to the jail.
Embittered by the experience, Fidel resigned in September 1944 and moved to Puerto Rico for a few years and eventually returned to Florida,
where he worked on the family orchid business.
Just before he left, Lesko gave him the Haitian Order of Merit for his service and efforts to improve Haitian agriculture with the Chada project.
Now public indictments against Chavez came very quickly after that.
Farnell was blamed for the fallout as a self-interested modern coloniser who exploited the Haitian people,
then left them without anything from Puerto Rico. Just months after leaving Haiti, he wrote a statement defending his job and his work in Haiti.
He said, quote, It is obvious that they make no attempt and they meaning his critics,
to present the facts in the case, but merely to smear my record with totally unsupported statements and quote,
The criticism of fennel and Shahada, however, greatly expanded and have echoed loudly in the historical historiography of Haiti.
Shada and all the people are associated with it, whereby in 1945,
on the eve of the revolutionary moment of 1946, synonymous with exploitation of Haitians.
That narrative only deepened after 1946 and the election of Estimé and the profound
black consciousness that defined Haiti's 1940s and its cultural legacies.
The student protests and even more, the estimated Previn's presidency might be seen as outcomes of an anger that demand closer investigation.
What might we learn from all of this if we treat the colossal failure of SHADO as one part of the drama of Haiti's 1940s?
This revision of intent and outcome might be applied to other elements of how we understand the Haitian past.
There is inherent in all of this a question of memory, always so vital to how we engage with Haiti, memory and history.
Sometime in the late 1990s in Petionville, Haiti, I attended a concert by Russian voodoo group Bookman Experience.
At the concert, the lead singer Lolo out during one of the songs adlibbed a list of historical moments of Haitian exploitation,
starting with French colonialism.
As he came closer to the present, he roared when he reached a 1940s new song Shada, which translates as we remember Shada.
The memory, he recalled, was a bitter collective memory borne in the powerful expression of Haitian nationalism of the 1940s.
As with all memories created in crisis, it carries forward emotions and it creates its own history.
Haiti has had too many moments of crisis which have sprung many conflicting histories of its past.
The crisis of gang violence of today is creating new explanations and rewriting
all memories of the journey that brought Haiti to this distressed point.
But if we are to remember the forces that sought to improve and those that sought to destroy Haiti,
we have to first see the Haitian past not as an unbroken chord of disaster, but loop threads frayed, but still firm.
And we must equally return to the past, as Nichols insisted in the seventies with his work with new questions from which we might get
some closer understanding of what we thought we knew about the many lives of Haitian freedom.
Thank you.