L'Ouverture, Toussaint (c. 1743–1803), Haitian patriot and revolutionary leader. A self-educated former slave, François Dominique Toussaint-L'Ouverture joined the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and became its foremost general, defeating both French and British forces. In 1802, he was betrayed and captured, and he died imprisoned in France.
Toussaint figures importantly in the early-nineteenth-century writings of James McCune Smith, David Walker, and Henry Highland Garnet, among others, as a symbol and exemplar of resistance to slavery, and as an example of the potential of the black race. William Wells Brown, in his pamphlet St. Domingo: Its Revolution and Its Patriots (1854), compares Toussaint favorably to Napoleon and George Washington: “Toussaint liberated his countrymen; Washington enslaved a portion of his.” George Clinton Rowe's seventy-stanza poem, Toussaint L'Ouverture (1890), lauds Toussaint as the “deliverer of his race.” Later African American writers such as Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois argued for Toussaint's importance in inspiring slave rebellions, in the abolition of the slave trade (1807), and in Napoleon's decision to sell the Louisiana Territory (1803).
In the twentieth century, Toussaint has been the subject of several dramatic treatments. Leslie Pinckey Hill's Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Dramatic History (1928), written in blank verse, aims “to help fill a long-continuing void": the presentation of black heroes. Hill draws explicit parallels between Toussaint and Christ, and sees Toussaint as exemplifying the best of “our universal human nature.” Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished play Toussaint (1958–1965), originally conceived as a musical or an opera, similarly aims at portraying Toussaint as a black hero and role model.
Toussaint has inspired several works by Afro-Caribbean writers, including Edouard Glissant's play Monsieur Toussaint (1961) and Aimé Césaire's historical work, Toussaint Louverture (1960). C. L. R. James's unpublished play Toussaint L'Ouverture (revised as The Black Jacobins, 1976), which featured Paul Robeson in the title role in a 1936 London performance, and his historical study, also titled The Black Jacobins (1938), both portray Toussaint as a hero tragically flawed by a “neglect for his own people” and an exaggerated respect for the French.
Arna Bontemps's novel Drums at Dusk (1939) sees Toussaint as separated from common Haitians by his literacy, heroic nature, and “god-like authority.” Margaret Walker, in her poem “The Ballad of the Free” (1970), groups Toussaint with other leaders of slave insurrections as an African American hero. In two quite different works, Ralph Ellison's short story “Mister Toussan” (1941) and Ntozake Shange's play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1977), Toussaint becomes a kind of distant, fairytale hero for children.
Bibliography
- J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination, 1988.
- Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, 1988
Gary Ashwill
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
