Stella. Emeric Bergeaud
lettres et l’être, 1992): 234. In the early twentieth century, some Haitian readers tired of reading Bergeaud’s style of “great men” history and, as with the examples of Frédéric Marcelin, Jacques Roumain, and Jacques-Stéphan Alexis, began to focus their literature on the lives of middle-class, peasant, and working-class Haitians. See Marcelin, Autour de deux romans (Paris: Kugelman, 1903): 27.
55 Pradel Pompilus explains the confusion surrounding the text’s generic uniqueness when he writes: “We are forced to count Stella as a novel because of the author’s considerable use of fiction, but in the end, it is really just a story of our battles for independence livened up by ingenious inventions of imagination” (Manuel illustré d’histoire de la littérature haïtienne, Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1961): 201. Our translation.
56 See Duraciné Vaval, Histoire de la littérature haïtienne: ou, “L’âme noire” (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Aug A. Héraux, 1933): 137. Nau’s periodical L’Union was filled with these types of history-stories.
57 See Jean Casimir, “Prologue: From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: To Live Again or to Live at Last!” in The World of the Haitian Revolution, ed. David Patrick Geggus and Norman Fiering (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009): xvii.
58 Pompée-Valentin, baron de Vastey, for example, insisted on solidarity between Haitians of different hues. He remarked on the fact that he was of an extremely fair complexion and politically sided with Henri Christophe, a man of dark complexion in his Le Système colonial dévoilé (Cap-Henry: Chez P. Roux, 1814).
59 Vastey, An Essay on the Causes of Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti, Being a Sequel to the Political Remarks Upon Certain French Publications and Journals Concerning Hayti By the Baron de Vastey, trans. W.H. M.B. (Exeter: Printed at the Western Luminary Office, 1823).
60 On this subject, see Marlene L. Daut, “The ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian Literature: Baron de Vastey and the U.S. Audience of Haitian Political Writing,” Comparative Literature 64, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 49-72. Christiane Ndiaye has long lamented what she terms the “impasse of literary criticism in the nineteenth century.” See Christiane Ndiaye, “Quelques impasses du discours de la critique littéraire du XIXe siècle,” in Relire l’histoire littéraire et le littéraire haïtiens (Port-au-Prince: Les Presses Nationales d’Haïti, 2007): 261–275.
61 Jean Price-Mars, in reaction to the American occupation of Haiti, sought to encourage a return to African heritage and a move away from French culture. His work presages that of other negritude authors like Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, and Antoine Dalmas. For more information on the influence of bovarysme on Haitian literature, see J. Michael Dash, “True Dechoukaj: Uprooting Bovarysme in Post-Duvalier Haiti,” in Politics and Power in Haiti, ed. Kate Quinn and Paul Sutton (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013): 27–42.
Recommended Reading
Dash, J. Michael. Literature and Ideology in Haiti 1915–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1981).
Daut, Marlene. Tropics of Haiti: A Literary History of Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
Dayan, Joan. Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New Word: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
———. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012).
Fisher, Sybille. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
Garraway, Doris. The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Geggus, David Patrick, and Norman Fiering, eds. The World of the Haitian Revolution (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009).
Ghachem, Malick Walid. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Hoffmann, Léon-François. “The First Haitian Novel: Émeric Bergeaud’s ‘Stella,’” in Essays on Haitian Literature (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1984): 111–122.
Jenson, Deborah. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).
Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti, revised ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
Popkin, Jeremy. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Prasad, Pratima. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Ramsey, Kate. The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Sepinwall, Alyssa, ed. Haitian History: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
Stella
Émeric Bergeaud
Author’s Note
Several years of work, often interrupted, have brought me to the conclusion of a piece that owes most of its creation to imagination. In it, I have tried to emphasize some of the most beautiful features of our national history. By wrapping these events in the vestments of fiction, my intention was to add nothing: that which is beautiful needs no embellishment. I simply wanted to capture, through the attraction of the novel, the minds of those who do not subject themselves to in-depth study of our annals.
A novel, without possessing the strict seriousness of history, can be a useful book: this is what I thought in embarking on this enterprise that long occupied my hours of leisure. May it answer the goodness of my designs!
Yet to produce some good, this book was to be a novel only in form. The truth had to be found in it. This is why I have taken pains not to disfigure history.
The Revolution in Saint-Domingue, a laborious birthing of a new society, gave rise to four men who personify its excesses and its glories: Rigaud, Toussaint, Dessalines, Pétion. I have borrowed from the lives of these men details necessary to complete the story of the two brothers who, properly speaking, have no individuality. Romulus, Remus, and the Colonist are collective beings. The African is an ideal, and Stella an abstraction.
That being said, I have but to confess my pious devotion, which inspired in me the idea to write this book, with which I pay homage to my country.
To the Reader
Émeric Bergeaud dedicated the sad hours of a long exile to the writing of this book. It was in working for his fellow countrymen that he hoped to ease the severities of his position and the ennui of being so far from his native land, from the nation that his venerated father helped to found for an entire race of men oppressed for centuries!
In