Stella. Emeric Bergeaud
In 1837, Nau suggested that young Haitian writers should study all schools of literary thought but “belong to none.”53 Stella responds to this call through its own attempt to blend history and literature, but Bergeaud’s novel is also very clearly written in the style of the historical romance, that is to say, the form made famous by Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, and James Fenimore Cooper. Like the historical texts written by these giants of the nineteenth-century Atlantic literary world, Stella takes the general outline of a historical event and recasts its details through the lives of invented, even abstracted characters, not unlike Edward Waverley, Jean Valjean, or Natty Bumppo. As in the genre popularized by Scott, much of the action in Stella, especially the military accounts, is taken from published historical sources. Indeed, much of the novel’s historical detail comes from Ardouin’s Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti, possibly inserted by the editor himself; but Bergeaud also draws on information from Pamphile de Lacroix’s La Révolution d’Haïti (1819), Antoine Métral’s Histoire de l’Expédition des Français à Saint-Domingue sous le consulat de Napoléon Bonaparte (1825), and Madiou’s Histoire d’Haïti. However, unlike historical work at the time, Stella unites the threads of different historians—particularly Madiou and Ardouin—by portraying the Revolution as both a successful slave uprising and a national independence movement.54 Furthermore, Bergeaud weaves aspects of allegory—both in terms of rhetorical device as well as generic form—together with abstraction and symbolism so that the novel is not explicitly controlled by any one device or formal approach. While Bergeaud builds upon previous models, ultimately Stella takes a form of its own.
Bergeaud’s narrator explains that the presentation of a fictional, rather than a historical, account allows for an exploration of the hidden human motives behind the struggle for freedom:
History is a river of truth that follows its majestic course through the ages. The Novel is a lake of lies, the expanse of which is concealed underwater; calm and pure on the surface, it sometimes hides the secret of the destiny of peoples and societies in its depths . . .
For Bergeaud, history’s sight is “limited to the horizon of natural things,” and thus cannot always know that which is beyond the horizon: “History leaves the field of mystery to the Novel. [. . .] The Novel tells the secret story.” It was Bergeaud’s design to develop interest in the history of Haitian independence through the popularity of the genre of the novel, and it therefore makes sense that he would choose as his model a literary form that overtly combines both fiction and history. For although Bergeaud insists that Stella is more of a novel than a history, the exact genre to which it belongs might be said to exist somewhere in between. In fact, its distinctiveness has led to confusion as to how to classify Stella, which has also led to difficulties in judging its literary value; these problems have contributed, in part, to the novel’s obscurity up to this point.55 In particular, Stella’s deviation from Scott’s genre involves Bergeaud’s connection to epic and oral storytelling traditions, evidenced through the author’s consistent use of “we,” and illustrated in, for example, the family scene in the ajoupa. If one of the aims of the School of 1836 was to distill familiar, oral renditions of history into a new written genre, Stella follows those indications well. In this way, his novel has more in common with Nau’s “contes historiques” or “contes créoles” and Dumesle’s travel writing than with Scott’s romances.56 Bergeaud’s goal of reaching both French and Haitian readers mirrors his novel’s combination of Haitian and European literary traditions.
Reading Stella
At the time of Stella’s publication, the population of Haiti was categorized and hierarchized according to color and class based on divisions inherited from the colonial era. After independence, some categorizations changed shape and the country further split along the lines of region, religion, and language. Haiti’s population differed most considerably from that of Saint-Domingue in that much of the white population had either fled the island or perished during the final days of the Revolution, a moment described in Stella with regret. In the early years of the country, the peasant or cultivateur class also expanded, which resulted in the development of a social distinction based on whether one lived in one of the wealthy cities (gens de la ville) or the rural outskirts (moun an deyò).57 Although skin color continued to be a defining characteristic in nineteenth-century Haiti, some political distinctions that seemed to be based on color—such as the constant conflicts between what have been called the “mulatto” or Boyerist and the “noiriste” or black populist factions—were often the result of intersecting differences in heritage, class, region, religion, and language; assumptions that a given person acted solely on the basis of skin color are frequently inaccurate.58 While the racialist distinctions that shaped the political world in which Bergeaud wrote had their bases in the colonial era, when they were specifically tied to issues of wealth, culture, language, and degrees of freedom, the social divisions of the early national period were not simply based on race or color prejudice. Stella both illustrates and responds to early Haiti’s cultural divides, and locates the origins of the history of difference and disunion in the machinations of the greedy Colonist.
Bergeaud’s insistence on the connection between his main characters, the fraternal founders of Haiti, has much to do with his decision to name them after the mythical twin founders of Rome. As does the figure of the Colonist, the brothers represent, however, multiple historical characters. They embody the actions and spirit of most of the revolutionary leaders: Romulus represents, at times, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe, while Remus is André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, and Charles Boyer. The brothers are the allegorical representations of the division—and eventual reunion—of the two dominant classes of Haitians at the time: the formerly enslaved black population and the Euro-African population. Bergeaud avoids discussing the division between those freed before 1793 and those freed after by making the experience of slavery common to both brothers who also share the same connection to Marie l’Africaine, Mother Africa. The other characters in the novel—Stella, Marie the African, and the Spirit of the Nation—are allegorical representations that portray archetypes rather than specific people from Haiti’s past. Stella is structured by its dedication to history, and its allegorical elements emphasize that Haiti’s transformation is significant not just to Haitians but to all humanity.
This Translation
Stella appeared in print over 150 years ago, but until recently it has not been available to English-speaking audiences. It appeared twice in the nineteenth century, originally in 1859, and a second time in 1887, apparently at the request of Bergeaud’s widow. Physical copies of either edition, which were printed in the small decimo-octavo (18mo) and duodecimo (12mo) formats, are exceedingly rare. Our edition is based on a microfilmed copy of the 1859 version held by the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris that belongs to Duke University. The University of Florida has digitized its copy of the 1887 edition, and made it available at the Digital Library of the Caribbean, http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00089373/00001. A modern French version was published in 2009 by Éditions Zoé in Geneva, Switzerland.
We have taken every effort to preserve the feeling of the 1859 text, including retaining much of the text’s italicization and punctuation—especially when used for emphasis—as well as the two original sets of notes with which the book was published. Bergeaud, for example, uses italicized print to emphasize the word “property” in the first chapter: the people described are the property of another person, just like the fruit tree outside their abode is the property of the Colonist. Our translation keeps these kinds of words italicized for emphasis whenever possible, and we have also provided a glossary for certain terms, such as ajoupa,