Trouillot asks in Kreyol who killed the emperor

Michel-Rolph Trouillot published an article in 1975 titled Ki Mo ki touye lanpere, meaning who killed the emperor. He wrote it in Haitian Kreyol. The choice carried weight, because Haitian history was written in French, which most Haitians could not read, and because Kreyol holds the proverbs and images Haitians actually reason with. Two years later he brought out Ti dife boule sou istwa Ayiti, the first full length book on the Haitian Revolution written in that language. His sentences work by showing. Independence, he wrote, came when free black men and enslaved men put their heads together, after which guns fired and fires burned three times a day in the plantations of the country then called Saint Domingue, and black men and men of mixed descent, women alongside men and children alongside adults, pointed their fingers into the face of injustice while the French were left with their mouths hanging open.

Haitians who reached the United States by boat at the end of the 1970s were held in detention camps, some of them in the deserts of the Southwest. They were given hearings and deportation orders without access to lawyers. Children were imprisoned. Detainees reported being fed food laced with drugs that caused men to develop breasts. Most of those affected had no permanent resident status and little protection, and they held public demonstrations and pickets anyway. The protests worked far enough that Haitian refugees were granted a temporary category called Entrant, and for a period the imprisonment and the deportations stopped. Through the 1980s the community organisations that had run those pickets began working with American legal groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, and busloads of Haitians travelled to Washington to demonstrate in support of cases being argued in court. That combination of street mobilisation and litigation became the standing method of Haitian politics in the United States.

Patrick Lemoine entered Fort-Dimanche on 10 January 1974 and survived it. He recorded 2 June 1975 as the day nine deaths were registered inside the prison. Fritz Dezagon, called Castro, died suddenly. After prayers and songs the men in his cell knocked on the door and shouted death, death, death. Voices from another cell answered at once that one of theirs had just gone. An hour later a third cell took up the same call. The man who removed the bodies had barely left with one when a fourth death was declared. The day went on that way, with blows against doors and walls added to the shouting, and after the ninth announcement the whole prison panicked and began to cry that they were being killed. Lemoine was certain the shouting carried the three kilometres to the sugar works at HASCO. Nobody outside reacted.

The Duvaliers held power in Haiti from 1957, and by the end of the 1970s the reckoning stood at more than thirty thousand people disappeared, victims of a daily repression built up into a system of government, and close to a million Haitians in exile for economic or political reasons. The country was kept alive by international aid that in practice protected foreign capital and the local fraction allied with it. American power on its own does not explain how one family took the state and held it. Haitian opposition groups had proved unable to produce a radical critique of the language the regime spoke, and often reproduced that language without noticing, out of fear of an analysis that would show where it came from. Explaining the regime as a natural inclination of the masses toward dictatorship was the most common form of that failure.