Ahatti, 1492
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1960
In kindergarten, in Haiti,
there was this allegorical image of Saint Francis of Assisi,
on the last page of our reading book.
It didn't matter that St. Francis was obviously white.
At the time, I was still unaware of any civilizational or racial differences.
I didn't even know that such differences were possible.
Besides the fact that he was a saint and I was not.
I knew as much about saints as I knew about copulation and bees.
My idea of religion, priests, or God, was, at best, naive if not reckless.
I truly believed that all human beings were basically,
in some sort of natural way, brothers and sisters.
Saint-Martial Seminary School Location Port-au-Prince, Haiti
It was in this euphoric state,
that I was sent to "primary school," a Jesuit institution.
On the very first day, I got into a fight with another boy.
We were both sent to the head priest to be disciplined.
While waiting for what I thought would be an appeasing pep talk
and reconciliatory handshake,
had no doubt that the outcome would be peaceful.
I loved my world of serenity and understanding.
To my surprise, the head priest, came in,
took a dry ox muscle hanging from the wall and, without a word,
whipped us raw, with three lashes each.
I was so stunned that I didn't cry.
Minutes later, alone in the school yard,
I realized that the world was not what I was told it would be.
The rituals, the dogma, the theatrics, were now transparent.
I decided that I was not going to be an imbecile in that show.
Especially if it involved saint, priest, and whip in that order.
Then, I stopped believing in God altogether.
EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES
PART II
I knew a man.
I knew him well enough to be able to call him a friend. He was a scholar.
One of the brightest. One day, I learned of his death.
After 10 years of daily struggle.
A cardiologist, inserted a malfunctioning pacemaker in his heart,
that would destroy its functions.
By the time they realized the mistake, it was too late.
Michel-Rolph wrote an extraordinary book: "Silencing the Past."
A masterpiece. The work of a lifetime.
By deconstructing the dominant narrative, he changed everything.
Knowledge is power.
But "history is the fruit of power," says Trouillot.
Whoever wins in the end, gets to frame the story.
On July 4th, 2012,
Trouillot passed away in his sleep at his home in Chicago.
This is his story as well.
THE ALAMO John Wayne, 1960
"Remember the Alamo, they say.
But remembering can be quite selective, writes Trouillot.
Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators.
Among the actors, we find General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna,
a Mexican national hero, who in his lifetime,
is said to have participated in more battles than Napoleon
and George Washington combined.
In his eventful career,
the Alamo was just a brief interlude in a long streak of defeats and victories.
By the middle of February 1836,
his army had reached the crumbling walls of the old mission
of San Antonio de Valero in the Mexican province of Tejas.
Some 200 American slave owners and militiamen,
now occupied the Spanish mission, nicknamed the "Alamo."
They refused to surrender to Santa Anna's superior force.
On March 6, General Santa Anna blew the horns
that Mexicans traditionally used to announce an attack to the death.
According to the celebrated story,
when it became clear that the choice for the 189 Alamo occupants
was between escape and certain death at the hands of the Mexicans,
commander William Barret Travis drew a line on the ground.
Those men who wish to stay will cross the line and stand with me.
The others may go, with my blessing.
Supposedly, everyone crossed,
except, of course, the man who conveniently escaped to tell the story.
I didn't survive Russia and Waterloo to die in this desert.
Obviously, a Frenchman.
Santa Anna's troops broke through the fort, killing most of the defenders.
A clear victory.
But a few weeks later, on April 21, at San Jacinto,
Santa Anna fell prisoner to Sam Houston,
the freshly certified leader of the secessionist Republic of Texas.
Houston's men had punctuated their victorious attack on the Mexican army
with repeated shouts of "Remember the Alamo! Remember the Alamo!"
With that reference to the old mission, they doubly made history.
As actors, the Texans captured Santa Anna and neutralized his forces.
As narrators, they give the Alamo story a new meaning.
What they did not say is that General Santa Anna quickly recovered
from the upset and went on to be the leader of Mexico four more times.
But this is not what history will remember.
General Santa Anna indeed lost the battle of the day,
but he also lost the battle he had won at the Alamo.
How much can we reduce what happened to what is said to have happened?
Does it matter whether events are fact or fiction?
Most Europeans and North Americans learned more about the history
of colonial America and the American West from movies
and television than from books.
The Alamo? That was a history lesson delivered by John Wayne on the screen.
What does it mean for our collective experiences?
Do we even wish for a common history?
Shoah Memorial Berlin, Germany
Does it really not matter whether or not the Holocaust is true or false?
Does it really not make a difference whether or not
the leaders of Nazi Germany planned and supervised
the killing of six million Jews?
Jean Bercu, deported in February 1944 at the age of 4.
If six million do not really matter, would two million be enough,
or would some of us settle for three hundred thousand?
If there is nothing to be proved or disproved,
what then is the point of the story?
HOME MOVIES Peck family
The history of America is being written in a world
where few little boys want to be Indians.
In 1492, neither Europe as we now know it,
nor whiteness as we now experience it existed as such.
Here is the story we have been told:
Christopher Columbus was born to a Genoese merchant family,
and as a trader at sea,
joined other European navigators competing for gold
and other lucrative commodities,
a market long dominated by Muslim traders.
It was no secret that the Earth was spherical
and Columbus believed a shorter,
more direct route could be used to reach valuable exotic spice islands.
Columbus sold the idea to the Spanish monarchy
and off he sailed with 3 ships headed directly West across the Atlantic.
Instead of the bustling ports of the East Indies,
Columbus came upon a tropical paradise,
populated by the Taino people, what is now Haiti.
Then, from the Iberian Peninsula,
came merchants, mercenaries, criminals, and peasants.
They seized the land and property of Indigenous peoples
and declared the territories to be extensions
of the Spanish and Portuguese states.
These acts were confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed
by the papal authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
That's more or less the official story.
And through that official story, a new vision of the world was created:
The Doctrine of Discovery.
The extent of the "demographic catastrophe"
that followed is without equivalent in world history.
Within a hundred years,
over 90 percent of the original population of this continent
would be wiped out.
Despite large-scale massacres, torture, and other inconceivable atrocities,
the great majority of these people did not die in battle.
Most died of disease, hunger and inhuman labor conditions,
because their social organization had been wrecked by the white conquerors.
Bartolomé de Las Casas,
the first ordained priest to officiate in the New Indies,
was one of the witnesses and a chronicler of this catastrophe.
Killing and enslaving other beings, thought to be equally human,
created a dilemma for him.
Our Lord Jesus said: I am the truth and the life.
I will try to speak the truth
about those from whom we are taking the lives.
Because this is the truth: we are destroying them.
Since the discovery and the conquest of the Indies,
the Spanish have not stopped enslaving torturing and massacring the Indians.
Since the very first contacts,
Spanish have been consumed by the thirst for gold.
It is their only claim. Gold! Gold! Bring us gold!
So much that the natives said:
"What do they do with all that gold? They must eat it."
Bartolomé de Las Casas believed both in colonization
and in the humanity of the Indians.
He was torn between the symbolic and the practical.
Incapable of reconciling the two.
Instead, he offered a poor and ambiguous compromise,
that he would later regret: freedom for the savages,
the Indians, slavery for the barbarians, the Africans.
DISPUTE IN VALLADOLID Jean-Daniel Veraeghe, 1992
If it is clear that Indians are our brother in the name of Jesus Christ,
endowed with a reasonable soul like ours.
On the other hand,
it is certain that the inhabitants of Africa
are much closer to animals.
Colonization won the day.
The seventeenth century saw the increased involvement
of England, France, and the Netherlands in the Americas and in the slave trade.
The eighteenth century followed the same path
with an added touch of perversity:
the more European merchants and mercenaries bought and conquered
other men and women in the Americas,
the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man.
Meanwhile, there was no single view of Blacks
or of any non-white group, for that matter.
All assumed that, ultimately, some humans were more so than others.
Viewed from outside the West,
the age of Enlightenment was a century of obscurity.
In the Western conception, Man was primarily European and male.
Everyone else was at the lowest level of this hierarchy.
I have no complaints. I just want to understand.
Trading human beings? What sick mind thought of this first?
Brought by force and pushed to death.
Slavery. Or the "Trade" as they refer to it euphemistically.
A state-sponsored genocide.
What does this say about a civilized world?
No. I have no complaints. I just want to understand.
Congo River, 1892
What if, from the beginning, the story was inaccurate?
What if it was not just a question of vocabulary or interpretation?
Perhaps a case of collective borderline personality disorder?
Okay, let's go!
What?
What about the boat?
Boat's probably stuck in Matadi. Up the river.
I need to join my parish.
I'm already two months late.
So?
Wait!
Faster!
Keep them tight!
Faster!
What is this?
Faster!
You there! Faster!
Stop that at once!
What do you think you are doing with those children?
What children? These are shipments.
Shipments?
They are to be trained as soldiers by the state. O sold as slaves.
Faster!
Keep them tight!
In Columbus' travel journal, there is a description
of the first sighting of land on Thursday, October 11th, 1492.
At two hours after midnight, land appeared,
from which they were about two leagues distant.
They hauled down the sails...
Passing time until daylight Friday,
when they reached an islet and descended.
A normal day, after all.
The isolation of a single fetishized moment creates a historical fact.
Once discovered,
"the Other" is allowed to finally enter the human world.
Whatever else may have happened to other peoples in that process
is reduced, as if by magic, to a natural fact:
they were discovered.
Show me the way my Lord.
Let me walk along your path.
Touch my heart to fear your name, my Lord.
As to surrender myself to your glory.
Show me the way, my Lord. Let me walk along your path.
Touch my heart...
What's the problem now? What did he do?
Nothing. Why?
My dear Rose, may these words convey to you the fullness of my sentiments.
I hope they will find you well.
It seems so strange to walk under this unbearable heat,
when only four months ago,
I could still comfort myself in your arms.
The madness in these distant lands is hard to describe.
I am making new experiences.
Two days ago, I saw my first corpses.
A good dozen of them, white little bodies,
floating into the darkness,
floating as if they were just resting for a long journey.
These are not our choices to make.
The ways of the Lord are infinite.
I miss so much
this delicate temple hidden in the depth of your thighs...
Any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences.
It is an exercise of power
that makes some narratives possible and silences others.
In this fabricated narrative, not all silences are equal.
Our job as filmmakers, writers, historians, image-makers,
is to deconstruct these silences.
From its first appearances, the word "Negre", Negro,
entered French dictionaries
with increasingly precise negative undertones.
By the middle of the eighteenth century,
"Black" was almost universally bad.
What had happened in the meantime,
was the expansion of African-American slavery.
That was the most potent impetus
for the transformation of European ethnocentrism into scientific racism.
"Blacks were inferior and therefore enslaved",
"Black slaves behaved badly and were therefore inferior."
The practice of slavery in the Americas secured the Black's position
at the bottom of the human world.
By the time of the American Revolution,
European ethnocentrism had merged into scientific racism
and framed the ideological landscape on both sides of the Atlantic.
The final years of the 18th century were called "The Age of Revolutions."
But one usually thinks of the American revolution,
starting in 1763 and the French Revolution of 1789.
Not the Haitian Revolution of 1790.
Indeed, in those changing years,
a particular group of Black slaves, men women, and children, would rise.
In just 10 short years, they would fight and create the Nation of Haiti,
the truly first free republic in America.
The only revolution that materialized the ideal of enlightenment:
freedom, fraternity, and equality for all.
In 1790, French colonist La Barre wrote to his wife in France
to reassure her of the peaceful state of life in the Tropics:
"There is no movement among our Negroes. They don't even think of it.
A revolt among them is impossible. Freedom for Negroes is a chimera."
Just a few months later,
the events would ridicule these racist assumptions.
A nation is not an act of creation,
but a process of growth.
You will take the city of Cap Haitian,
but only when it is reduced to ashes.
And even on those ashes, I will fight you.
What happened in Haiti
contradicts most of what the West has claimed about itself.
The silencing of the Haitian Revolution
is part of a narrative of global domination.
Nevertheless, the revolution played a central role
in the collapse of the entire system of slavery
and in the liberation of Latin America.
Haiti created the possible.
The Haitian Revolution was unthinkable even as it happened.
But "unthinkable" only in the framework of a self-centered Western thought.
Unthinkable in the West,
not only because it challenged slavery and racism,
but because of the way it did so.
It was the ultimate test of the universalist pretensions
of both the French and the American revolutions.
And they both failed that test.
Confronted with this "unthinkable",
Napoleon sent 65,000 troops to reestablish slavery in Haiti.
His whole army was defeated within two years.
Forcing him to renounce his American dreams
and sell all of his American properties.
The so-called "Louisiana Purchase" doubled the size of the United States
and, through this added power,
would accelerate the conquest of the rest of Indian territories.
The debt owed to Haiti still remains to be paid.
I fell in love in Rome.
I made my first film in Berlin.
My parents spent 25 years in Africa.
My daughter was born in Uganda and went to school in New Jersey.
One brother works for the Seminóles, the other won an Emmy...
My older brother spent two years in Vietnam and even more with PTSD.
Who are we?
I have taught filmmaking from Norway to Lebanon and from New York to Lomé.
Who am I?
Who am I in this official pre-approved Eurocentric classification?
Bonding...
Helping each other, walking together, loving each other!
That's why I love the young!
I once followed a charismatic man
whom I revered and who one day betrayed his people.
I made a film about him too.
Who am I?
De Cuba traigo un Cantar. Raoul Peck. 1982
I have traveled to many places. And have never called them my own.
And no violence was ever involved.
Places where I lived.
Places where I worked.
Places where I loved and sometimes was loved.
I played war in the streets of Léopoldville.
I rode a bicycle in Katanga.
I built houses in Cuba.
Who am I?
During the sixteenth century,
England began its brutal conquest of Ireland
and declared half a million acres of land in the north open to settlement.
Under British colonial rule,
the Irish were regarded as a lower species and naturally inferior.
They were descendants of apes, while of course,
the English were descendants of "man,"
who had been created by God "in his own image."
The English were "angels."
But Britain's Irish policies
brought economic ruin to Ireland's wool and linen industries.
The invaders became losers.
This pushed nearly a quarter of a million
Calvinist Scots-lrish colonizers to leave Ireland
for British North America.
One of history's greatest migrations.
But as foot soldiers of British empire-building
and even before ever encountering Indigenous Americans,
the Scots-lrish had already practiced scalping for bounty, on the Irish.
Theodore Roosevelt said of his Scots-lrish ancestors:
"They were a grim, stern people.
Strong and simple, powerful in good and evil,
relentless, revengeful, suspicious. Knowing neither ruth, nor pity.
They were of all men the best fitted to conquer the wilderness
and to hold it against all comers.
They made up the officer corps
and were soldiers of the regular army
as well as the frontier-ranging militias that cleared areas
for settlement by exterminating Indigenous farmers
and destroying their towns.
They served in slave patrols as well as in the Confederate Army.
They regarded themselves as chosen people of the covenant,
commanded by God to go into the wilderness to build the new Israel.
I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear
that I will faithfully execute
the office of president of the United States.
All modern nation-states claim a kind of rationalized origin story
upon which they fashion patriotism or loyalty to the state.
So help me God!
According to God's unfathomable will,
one is born as part of the elect or not.
And being elected gives you the right to implement God's will
and eliminate the native people.
Because individuals could not know for certain
if they were among the elected or not,
material wealth became the manifestation of election.
Conversely, bad fortune and poverty,
not to speak of dark skin, became evidence of damnation.
The attractiveness of such a doctrine is quite obvious,
commented historian Donald Akenson.
The natives are immutably profane and damned,
while oneself is predestined to virtue.
The Puritans who founded the Massachusetts colony
endorsed this virtue.
Forty-one of the "pilgrims," all men, wrote and signed the compact.
Invoking God's name, while planting the First Colony.
The United States is supposedly a "nation of immigrants."
But this assumption masks a reality of over three centuries of violence.
According to the myth,
the faithful citizens come together of their own free will
and pledge to each other and to their god
to form and support a godly society,
and their god in turn vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land.
But for non-European immigrants,
no matter how much might they strive to prove themselves
to be as hardworking and patriotic as descendants of the original settlers,
they are suspect.
To be accepted, they must prove their fidelity
to the covenant and what it stands for.
They must endeavor to embrace whiteness
and look down on descendants of enslaved Africans,
the Indigenous, and Mexicans,
none of whom, of course, are immigrants.
It was a messy night, not Thursday anymore, but not yet Friday.
This is Howard Zinn. Probably the most decisive historian of this country.
This is Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz. A respected historian as well.
Her father was Scots-lrish and she once married a famous poet.
Howard and Roxanne are friends.
When Howard published "A People's History of the United States,"
it immediately became a milestone in the deconstruction
of the official American narrative.
A distinguished white scholar was for once questioning the dream
and telling the story differently.
One day, Roxanne asked Howard
why he left out parts of the Native people's story.
Howard listened quietly, then confessed:
"I don't know how to write it."
"Why don't you write it?"
So, Roxanne did. Putting Native Americans at the center.
And knowing that it was going to be painful.
I met Howard long before I met Roxanne.
And when I met Roxanne, Howard had died a few years earlier.
And Howard never read Roxanne's finished book.
I learned from Howard, Roxanne and Michel-Rolph.
As we learn from our elders.
From them, I learned to favor the collective over the individual,
to look for the "we" before indulging in the "I"
and to always place oneself "within the world," not above.
Learning years.
Contrary to what has been asserted about the birth of the United States
and its domination of the continent,
it was neither superior weapons nor technology,
nor a superior number of settlers, nor disease,
that is to say, not "guns, steel, and germs"
that can account for it.
The determining factor of this domination was the willingness
to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land.
The case of Andrew Jackson,
The 7th president of the United States is a telling story.
Andrew Jackson is enshrined in most US history texts
in a chapter titled 'The Age of Jackson,'
'The Age of Democracy,' 'The Birth of Democracy,'
or some variation thereon.
Jackson's family personified the Protestant Scots-lrish migration.
He was an influential Tennessee land speculator, politician
and wealthy owner of a slave plantation, near Nashville,
worked by a 150 slaves: The Hermitage.
Jackson bought his first slave, a young woman, in 1788.
He was 21 years old.
When Tennessee became a state, he was elected at the age of 29,
as its first US senator.
An office he quit after a year
to become a judge in the Tennessee Supreme Court.
As a judge, he was in a better position to seize Native lands.
It was in 1801 that Jackson first took command of the Tennessee militia
as a colonel and began his Indian-killing military career.
In 1821, by then a national hero,
Jackson became military governor of the Florida territory.
In 1829, Jackson became president.
By that time, it was already clear that this new nation
called the United States of America
needed a clear and decisive policy toward the first Americans.
It was their land after all.
1830, Congress passed the "Indian Removal Act."
Andrew Jackson immediately pushed through to forcibly deport
all Indigenous peoples from East of the Mississippi
to what they would then call "Indian Territory."
The Seminóles, in Florida, were one of the Nations which firmly resisted.
Jackson sent in the Army.
And as usual, when a power decides to "solve" a problem,
especially if it includes the removal of whole peoples, it turns ugly.
Quartermaster General Thomas Sidney Jesup was made commander of that force.
He would become the embodiment of every other henchman in history.
Treaty of the Hickory Ground, 1814
A treaty is an agreement signed by two nations,
in order to establish borders and conditions for their mutual survival.
Council at Medicine Lodge Creek Kansas, 1867
But nevertheless, from 1832 to 1871,
American Indians were arbitrarily considered to be
domestic dependent tribes.
And as such any treaty had to be approved by the US Congress.
Andrew Jackson said
to Secretary of war John Caldwell Calhoun of Scotch-lrish descent,
who considered slavery as a necessary evil:
"I think making treaties with Indians is not only useless but absurd."
Indeed, to accept the term treaty
was to tacitly accept the notion of Nation.
During the Jacksonian period,
also called "the birth of the white republic,"
the United States made eighty-six treaties
with twenty-six Indigenous nations between New York and the Mississippi,
all of them forcing land handovers, and including removals.
And then, they signed treaty after treaty,
which were violated one after the other.
Famous French aristocrat and writer, Alexis de Tocqueville,
witnessed part of what would become known as the "Trail of Tears."
He was present at the deportation of the Choctaw people.
I saw with my own eyes several of the cases of misery
which I have been describing.
I was the witness of sufferings
which I have not the power to portray.
No cry, no sob. All were silent.
Life? Race? Patriotism?
What is a flag?
A piece of cloth to die for? Or to kill for?
Explain in two words.
To be continued...