The Haitian Revolution: A Ruttier – Mara van Herpen

The focus of my cultural map is the Haitian Revolution, which took place roughly from 1757 through to 1820. In “Hegel and Haiti”, Susan Buck-Morss makes an argument against the marginalization of the colonies in narratives about moves towards democracy and equality during the Enlightenment period (836). Never having encountered this revolution in any of my formal education— despite extensive coverage of the French and American revolutions— I was inspired to research the insurrection in the former Saint-Domingue which eventually led to an independent Haiti.

This map takes on the form of the ‘oral ruttier’ as defined by Dionne Brand: “a long poem containing navigational instructions that sailors learned by heart and recited from memory” (266). As a navigational poem, the map acts as a guide through the timeline of the Revolution. It engages with the concept of transculturality, exploring the way in which thought travels between cultures, and how Haiti and France appear entangled in the revolutionary history of the late 18th and early 19th century.

An indispensable resource used in the making of this map is Stephanie Curci and Chris Jones’ website Mapping the Haitian Revolution, which presents a timeline coupled with an interactive map of the Revolution. The time-stamps in the poem are based on their organization. In writing, I have also taken inspiration from Alejo Carpentier’s magical realist novel The Kingdom of This World, which presents Haiti as the center stage to historical developments in the early modern period, yet also reckons with the way power and inequality are reinstated in the wake of movements
for equality, freedom and democracy.

I considered presenting the map as a concrete poem, in order to mimic the spatial elements of a geographical map. However, in my formal experiments I found that this— maybe as a result of my own limited digital skills— distracted from the contents, and would perhaps have been better
suited for a work of found poetry.

Works Cited
Buck-Morss, S. “Hegel and Haiti.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 26, no. 4, 2000, pp. 821-865.
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Vintage Canada, 2001.
Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World, Translated by Pablo Medina, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017 [1949].
Curci, Stephanie and Chris Jones. Mapping the Haitian Revolution, Tang Institute; Phillips Academy, 2019. haiti.axismaps.io/. Accessed 24 January 2021.