Haiti+(Medium+Entry)

In1823, //Absalom, Absalom!'s// Thomas Sutpen runs away from Virginia and somehow makes his way to the island of Haiti. There he finds work as the manager of a French sugar plantation and, four years later, in 1827, singlehandedly represses a slave revolt. It is also in Haiti that Sutpen meets his first wife, Eulalia, who eventually gives birth to their son, Charles Bon. Close examination of the role the idea of the island plays in the novel, as well as its history, proves Faulkner used Haiti to articulate a history and the relationship between that history and progress. Ultimately, through characters like Thomas Sutpen and Charles Bon as well, characters with close ties to the island, Faulkner was able to reflect upon the implications of the imperialist efforts within America of his own generation and narratives of subsequent human displacement. By using specific language, he presents a satire of the discourse of paternalism used to justify that aggressive imperialism.

Published in 1936, the dates Faulkner arranges the novel around are problematic, considering that the Haitian revolution occurred between 1791 and 1804. In reality, by 1823, there were neither slaves nor French plantations left on the island. However, Faulkner made this error to frame the themes of his story within a wider context that was historically relevant to his time. The Haitian Revolution had an impact throughout the hemisphere, with significant effects in the United States South where white hysteria over slave revolts had grown to an epidemic during the 1790's. Haiti became one of the first symbols of black liberation, synonymous with revolution, and remained so throughout the following century. The figure of the creole was especially threatening to American southerners, who were so terrified of the potential effects any contact with refugees might have on their own slaves that, for a time, they were able to prohibit immigration into the ports of Charleston and New Orleans. In her essay, ""The Direction of Howling": Nationalism and the Color Line in //Absalom, Absalom!,//" Barbara Ladd posits that the it was "the fear of the effects of rumor, of talk, that made Americans distrust even white creoles." Underneath their deceiving white appearance and gentile mannerisms, they could conceal news and rumblings of rebellion and liberation which could jeopardize the so-called peace of the American slave states. That word-of-mouth dialogue is something Faulkner touches upon briefly, the events within the Sutpen household trickling into the town of Jefferson, "through the negroes" (AA, 62), Sutpen's crew of Haitian slaves. The greater threat posed by creole men and women was the sheer fact that they made visible what was previously concealed through distance, confronted the modern world with the results of its own brutal colonialism. As posited by Ladd, the figure of the creole is able to articulate "the political and cultural repressions and displacements" (Ladd, 526) with arose as a result of the world's colonial history. The stories of Thomas Sutpen and Charles Bon therefore present a psychological recapitulation of the history of imperialism and its consequences.

In 1915, when Faulkner was eighteen, US marines entered Haiti and, in less than a mere month, gained complete control of the Haitian government. For fifteen years, until 1934, Haiti was commandeered by the United States. Faulkner had crafted the majority of //Absalom, Absalom!// by the time troops began withdrawing about six months later. The American government put a great deal of effort into convincing the population that their presence in Haiti was not only necessary but crucial to the well being of the Haitian people, (the real motives, of course, being the economic possibilities that were to be had). In ""My Son, My Son!": Paternalism, Haiti, and Early Twentieth-Century American Imperialism in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!", Sara Gerend explains the kind of images and language employed in those efforts. The citizens of America were trained to view the native people of Haiti as abandoned, fatherless children, "who lived all alone on an unsupervised island" (Gerend, 20) in desperate need of guidance which Uncle Sam could generously provide by taking them under his wing. Marines tasked with the role of enforcing US rule on the island were encouraged to view themselves as father figures who could watch over the rambunctious natives. This paternalistic language had long been used by the American government to justify its principles regarding slavery and is this idea of paternalism which Faulkner seeks to demonstrate through the narrative of //Absalom, Absalom!//

That a young man like Sutpen ends up in the West Indies is not entirely surprising. Haiti held immense economic significance for the United States, the Caribbean representing the dream-like pinnacle of all the possibilities of American expansion as, Ladd reminds us, it would be once again for Quentin's generation (and was for Faulkner's). During the first half of the eighteenth-century, the United States witnessed the development of an ideology which justified this expansion, crafting the design of the mission as messianic. Already paternalism begins to be invoked within the nation "where even the enslavement of the darker races could be seen as a step toward lifting them out of such darkness and into the light of God's righteous millennium" (Ladd, 538). In Haiti, General Compson remarks, Sutpen had found a world where his background was irrelevant but a quick buck could still be made "if you were courageous and shrewd" (AA, 201). The antithesis to the South, no one questioned his history, or even how he came to be there. Haiti, "a little island set in a smiling and fury-lurked and incredible indigo sea… the halfway point between what we call the jungle and what we call civilization" (AA, 202), provided Sutpen with the chance he so desperately sought to reinvent himself. Of course, any wealth that was to be made was unavoidably at the violent expense of others, the very soil of the island "manured with black blood from two hundred years of oppression and exploitation" (AA, 202). It is true that death rates within the Haitian colony's slave population during the eighteenth-century were extraordinarily high, the very winds which blew across the island "burdened still with the weary voices of murdered women and children" (AA, 204). Haiti appears in the text as a land almost otherworldly in essence, a grotesque phenomenon of nature; "a spot of earth… created and set aside by Heaven itself… as a theater for violence and injustice and bloodshed and all the satanic lusts of human greed and cruelty, for the last despairing fury of all the pariah-interdict and all the doom" (AA, 202). Wedged between the "dark inscrutable continent from which the black blood… was ravished by violence and the cold known land to which it was doomed," the little island sat, "homeless and desperate on the lonely ocean" (AA, 202).

The significance of Charles Bon lays within the fact that through the construction and reconstruction of the character, Faulkner summarizes the construction and reconstruction of history as it is constantly confronted by the demand of progress to transcend history itself. As a result, Jason and Quentin's versions of the story diverge because they represent two generations whose perception of the story corresponds to their understanding of the United States depending upon the time in which they live. Most notably, it is only in Quentin's account of the events that Bon is constructed as black. As Quentin and Shreve piece the story together, inadvertently employing this paternalistic discourse to construct the figure of Charles Bon, Faulkner effectively manages to satirize that discourse constantly employed by the American government to justify and maintain its imperialism. Bon essentially becomes the black son who craves the recognition and acknowledgement of his white father and hails from an abandoned land, "into which no help could come" (AA, 204). They repeatedly emphasize Charles' difficult and broken childhood, perfectly articulating the story woven around Haiti's own failed parentage in paternalism. They describe Bon as a "little boy" who "took it for granted that all kids didn't have fathers… and that getting snatched everyday… being held for a minute or five minutes under a kind of incomprehensible fury and fierce yearning and vindictiveness and jealous rage was part of childhood which all mothers of children had received in turn from their mothers and from their mothers in turn" (239). Only once he has reached adulthood do they believe that Bon comes to understand his unusual origins and the gaping lack in his life created by the absence of his father. In their narration, Haiti comes to exist "as a fatherless nation" (Gerend, 26) as they continue to reiterate the narrative of the black, Haitian son whose desperate desire for recognition from the white, American father will drive him to obtain it at all costs. Haiti is, in essence, transformed into that abandoned child who so desires America's paternal control. In the end, the very destinies of men like Charles Bon and Thomas Sutpen are inextricably linked to the histories of their origins. Haiti and its offspring essentially confront history with the consequences of history. In that sense, the arrival of Charles Bon, the Haitian son, in America to claim the father once and for all represents the return of the America's own tragic history to the South.

Works Cited

Gerend, Sara. "My Son, My Son!": Paternalism, Haiti, and Early Twentieth-Century American Imperialism in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. //The Southern Literary Journal//. 42:1, 17-31. 2009. The University of North Carolina Press. Web.

Ladd, Barbara. "The Direction of the Howling": Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom!. //American Literature//, 66:3, 525-551. September, 1994. Duke University Press. Web.