“It Cancels the Slave Ship!”: Africa, Slavery, and the Haitian Revolution in Langston Hughes’sEmperor of Haitiand Aimé Césaire’sThe Tragedy of King Christophe

Langston Hughes and Aimé Césaire knew each other only slightly but shared a dedication to telling stories of a noble and uplifting black past. They also shared a fascination with the Haitian Revolution and its early-nineteenth-century aftermath. Both wrote plays about the first decades of Haiti’s independence: Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti (1936) is set during the rise and rule of Jean-Jacques Dessalines; Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) recounts the rule of his successor Henri Christophe. These plays enfold Haiti’s story of armed resistance to slavery and oppression into a larger story of a noble African past. But both writers are keenly aware of the dangers of “musealization,” the process by which memorials to the past render it, paradoxically, prone to being forgotten and neglected. Significantly, then, these authors tell the story of Haiti’s journey from slavery to independence and then to despotism through the comparatively ephemeral mode of drama. In Diana Taylor’s terms, Hughes and Césaire bring the narratives of slavery and revolution out of the inert archive and reanimate them through living, ever-evolving performances of the repertoire. Hughes and Césaire thereby strive to endow Dessalines and Christophe, larger-than-life figures from the black past, with the permanence and authority of the archive. But they also leave narratives of slavery and revolt open to what Hortense Spillers calls new “modes of improvisation and rearrangement” – to continual reanimation, reinterpretation, and reinvention.