Brush with Haiti (3 page)

The companions arrived, and proved to be delightful conversationalists. This was a post-earthquake visit for me, and it was good to engage in lively talk in the midst of where destruction had been so severe just months before. The young man and woman were very well educated, clearly from the upper class, and noticeably fair-skinned. We talked politics, religion, and economics in ways deemed taboo in the States, at least with strangers. I mostly listened, trying to make better sense of things. I suppose we have a tendency to filter new information and experiences through a lens of familiarity. Race and class play such prominent roles in Latin American society that I could not help but allow my perceptions to be shaped by what I had already come to know through study and travel. I found myself sorting, classifying, and categorizing what was coming out of their mouths based on who I thought they were, or what group I thought they represented. Becoming conscious of this bothered me, as I had apparently evolved, or devolved, into someone who could not simply enjoy an exchange in that place and in that moment.

The young man - tall, lean, and strikingly handsome -had spent much time in the U.S. When the topic of Aristide arose, he was quite critical, and I attributed that to his race, class, and U.S. experiences. Without saying so openly - even after rum punches - I probed a bit deeper. He and the woman both agreed that they had held hope for Aristide and his promises early on, but became disenchanted. By this time, he had come to and left the presidency once more, and their youth suggested they had supported him in his more recent election. But they hinted at the use of intimidation against political enemies by those in his inner circle. Their tone and body language indicated they wanted to say more, but hesitated. I did not ask any more questions. Perhaps I wanted to keep a more idealistic version of Aristide in my mind.

The semester I heard Aristide
speak also marked the first time I taught a course devoted entirely to the history of the Caribbean. I was teaching full time at Purdue Calumet, though not yet on the tenure track. I had pressed to teach Latin American history there, in addition to U.S. History surveys and Women in America, letting my department chair know that things had gone well at Valparaiso. Normally a department would make a decision to create a position for a specialist in the area, but I did not foresee that happening. The curriculum at that time centered on the United States and Western Europe, and though courses in Latin America were still on the books, they had not been taught in years.

At first I was told they would not be popular, but I pointed out that my classes always filled. Plus, I was working for peanuts and was nothing if not cost-effective. I wondered what popularity had to do with the teaching of history anyway. Devoting a course entirely to the Caribbean was admittedly taking a chance and it would be a rare addition to history curricula in many parts of the country. But I believed the course was warranted. I had attempted to cover as much of the region as possible in my Latin American history surveys, but there just was not ample time to give it the attention I believed it deserved. The Caribbean has a unique and complex history which is not always easy to integrate with those of surrounding regions. Its inclusion in Latin American history at all is not common, at least regarding anything that occurred after the voyages of Columbus. And then, emphasis is given to the Spanish-speaking islands, or the Greater Antilles, or simply Cuba. By designating a separate course, I could devote more balanced attention to the French, English, and Dutch Islands, and examine the distinct - while sometimes combative -histories they experienced.

The response among students was great, but that from faculty colleagues not so much. Some looked down their noses, as Ph.D.'s often do. I was trying to become accustomed to that. What made things worse was that our academic advisor, a faculty member of equal rank who frequently defended the notion of American exceptionalism, joked with students about how my class would be meeting out on the lawn where we would all smoke
ganja.
Under other circumstances I might not have felt so threatened, but trivializing one's work in the academic arena can be tenure track homicide. What bothered me in addition were comments later made by a junior faculty member whose opinions I had come to respect. He was an up-and-coming scholar in the area of Atlantic history and his research was impeccable. I considered him a friend and valuable addition to the department. One night in a bar, where some ofus gathered on Fridays, he asked about my work.

"I heard you teach the history of the Caribbean."

"Yes," I replied, eager for an intelligent exchange on our specialties.

"But nothing happened there," he said. "The Europeans discovered it, and the islands became nothing more than sugar producers for the empires." He basically suggested I was wasting a semester of my students' valuable time.

Instead of taking a moment to describe what it was that I taught, the books I used, or the methodology, I backed off. I had already spent too much time and energy justifying the inclusion of Latin America in the curriculum. The Latino student population of our campus was the largest of any in the state, and to deny them the opportunity to learn their history was, in my opinion, criminal. But I was not teaching it only for them. To omit an entire region from the curriculum was making a statement to all students that its contributions to the human story were insignificant.

I had grown sensitive to the tensions between Latino and black students and did not want to be too public in my pleas, for African history was also absent from our offerings. I was in no position to introduce courses on African history, but I hoped my growing passion for the Caribbean might influence the development of an effective class that included a substantive address of the African diaspora. And the cultural richness and diversity of the Caribbean might aid in breaking down any barriers that existed between black and Latino students. The lines become blurred in studying the Caribbean. In my world history survey classes I found myself zeroing in on the Caribbean as a microcosm of the world, where all of the major European empires vied with one another in colonization and battles for gold, silver, and gemstones through mining and piracy. Native populations quickly disappeared and were replaced by shiploads of Africans destined for harsh lives, and often early deaths, under slavery. Mulatto populations emerged where Europeans had sexual intercourse with Africans - often by force. Each island gave birth to a culture distinctly "New World" but with varying degrees of European influence, the most apparent of which was found in languages.

In one world history class I used Sammy Sosa as an example. Continually grasping for pop culture references to illustrate historical development and make it seem relevant, baseball came to mind. No one at that time could deny the exceptional promise of the Chicago Cubs. Not much of a sports fan, even I knew they were all the rage.

"So why might someone who looks like Sammy Sosa speak Spanish?" I asked one of my classes. "Where is he from?"

"The Dominican Republic?" one ventured to guess.

"Were a lot of slaves brought there, too?" another asked.

"Sammy Sosa is black?" I heard from a black student. She struck me from early on in the semester as someone who had never paid much attention to history before, but had reached an age when she became insatiably curious. She asked a lot of questions, and this one prompted a discussion regarding shades of skin color. She looked at her arm and agreed that she and Sosa were about the same shade. "I thought he was just very dark Spanish." I was not sure what that meant, but I took it as an indication that my instincts were right about the value of teaching Caribbean history.

While I could not expect complete acceptance from my department colleagues, a sense of camaraderie emerged unexpectedly at a subsequent conference of Latin Americanists. Meeting periodically with our counterparts at regional, national, or international conferences can satisfy us with the validation we need to be more effective on our own campuses. This is where we share ideas, present our research, obtain constructive feedback, learn what is new in our fields, and even share classroom tips. Conference attendance can give us the rejuvenation we need - a dose of oxygen, so to speak -and even an enlightening conversation over cocktails now and then, in a magnificent location if the organizers are lucky.

That was not the case with this one, scheduled on a dreary winter weekend in the rural Upper Midwest. Still, it is where I heard a most inspiring presentation on why the Haitian Revolution should serve as a key component of any Latin American History survey, and play an integral part in teaching about the Revolutionary movements that swept North America and Europe. This perspective had not yet been put forward in a way that reached many educators in the field. It was still the late 1990s, and Latin America as a whole had been given little attention within the wider context of world history. And among courses devoted to Latin America Haiti was often still missing.

The professor making the case was a reserved woman from the Dominican Republic, who taught at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Though I had long been enamored of the Wisconsin system, what I knew of Stevens Point was that it lay about three quarters of the way to our Upper Peninsula fishing destination where my family went each summer.

"Yes," I would tell my friends incapable of picturing me sitting in a boat on a lake, reeling in bluegill, "we drive through Wisconsin to get to Michigan." Stopping in Stevens Point for some locally brewed Point beer had become a ritual marking the true beginning of vacation. By that place in the trip the air had become more crisp and the evergreen trees more abundant. I wondered what the life's journey of a woman making her way from the Dominican Republic to northern Wisconsin must have looked like. My wonder did not distract me from what she was saying, however. Her case was strong.

She argued that learning about the Haitian Revolution was vital to understanding the Revolutionary Era as a whole. It lay at the crux of the period, between U.S. independence and the sweeping independence of Latin American nations reaching from Mexico - which then included the territory from California to Texas - all the way south to Chile and Argentina. As a French colony, the struggles in St. Domingue represented the dominant elements of the American Revolution, and then some. Demands for legislative representation within the empire, and then separation and the forging of an autonomous Haitian republic, reflected parallel events rooted in Enlightenment philosophy. But the movement also included widespread slave rebellion. Napoleon Bonaparte considered the colony's sugar profits so valuable to France that he was willing to sell Louisiana to the new United States in order to focus on keeping it within his empire. Once independent, Haiti was widely viewed as a black republic with no legitimate future, and the slave-holding U.S. President Thomas Jefferson refused to recognize it as a new nation.

I was deeply indebted to this professor for her work on the subject and the time she took to present it. If I am not mistaken, her paper was subsequently published in
The History Teacher,
a journal issued by the Society for History Education, an affiliate of the American Historical Association. My personal thanks to her at the time could not have been enough. Her perspective was not entirely new to me; rather, it reinforced and enhanced what I had already suspected. I found comfort in her work, knowing that I was not alone in my desires to see Haiti given its rightful place.

About halfway through
my first semester teaching Caribbean history, I thought it would be interesting to invite a colleague to speak to the students about voodoo. We were fortunate to have a Haitian-born adjunct faculty member teaching in the Department of Foreign Languages, and she and I had chatted here and there about Haitian history. She taught Spanish, was fluent in French and Creole, and her primary interest was literature. I was fascinated by her command of languages and ability to integrate linguistics and culture into her courses and conversations. My research in Cuban Santeria had ignited a special interest in syncretic religions, and I wanted to learn more about what the parallels between Santeria and voodoo might be. Santeria is considered by some more genuinely syncretic - a clearer blending of Roman Catholicism and West African Yoruban beliefs and practices, while voodoo is primarily African.

Some Roman Catholics and Yorubans would disagree, each either drawing Santeria closer to their teachings, or pushing it further away. Rituals, altars, offerings, and saints representing various aspects of the world and answering human prayers are present in each. To the academic observer, comparable elements are apparent. In voodoo there are similar parallels; however, many, especially Catholics, argue that there is nothing Catholic about it. Historically, Protestant colonists in the islands, particularly fundamentalists and Calvinists, viewed Catholicism and voodoo as equally wicked, and Catholics no less pagan than non-converted Africans. To them, Catholicism reeked of idolatry and had strayed from Christianity in its purist form.

Eternally fascinated by the many ways in which religion has influenced the human story, I had dabbled in historical explorations of these concepts. However, I was also aware that the theological rifts were not limited to the past. They lingered and I needed to keep that in mind when lecturing on religion in class. Some might advise avoiding discussions of religion altogether, but it is both absurd and unwise to ignore religion when teaching history. Academic approaches to religion are indeed possible, and I learned that as a college student myself. I attended a small Catholic school in Indiana, where we were required to take two courses in theology. I chose Introduction to Theology taught by a priest who assigned Huston Smith's
Religions of Man
as our main text. He also incorporated ongoing scientific discoveries regarding the universe that challenged man's contemporary understanding of life's origins. My education, worldview, and subsequent life were changed deeply as a result. The other class I chose, also taught by a priest, was The Old Testament. We learned when the Old Testament was written, how it was written, and why it was written. We learned about time and place and human players, as well as the politics of translation. We studied it as a historical document.