Reading Stella (1859) – the first novel published by a Haitian author – relieved me of an overdue debt.Footnote ¹ The text had been on my shelves for a good decade without me having looked at it. In the meantime, I had read quite a bit of fiction about the Haitian Revolution. My reticence was not because I regarded Stella as a minor or avant-garde text. Rather, previously, I had been interested in fictional accounts of the revolution written by foreign authors. I was, therefore, excited to return to this novel. However, I found myself disappointed, ultimately, by the employment of the revolution, by the historical narrative form as a whole, and by the narrative intention, even when its characters inform us about the historical past from their respective points of view.

What I propose, therefore, is a discrepant allegorical reading of the text.Footnote ² A discrepant allegory can be equally contrapuntal in that it requires the reader to go beneath the text to find what it conceals. In other words, one has to look at the interaction between what is overtly said in the narration and what is hidden. Applying Edward Said’s contrapuntal analysis to Stella, two discrepant experiences are at work throughout the novel. Generally, in Said’s terms, reading a text in a contrapuntal way presupposes the interaction of the colonizer’s perspective and that of the colonized.Footnote ³ Although Émeric Bergeaud was Haitian-born and not a foreigner, I posit that his fictional narrative is in alignment with a European point of view despite the fact he definitely thought he wrote from a Haitian point of view.Footnote ⁴

The work is fundamentally Eurocentric, which obliterates everything relating to local and African values. The ideals of order, law, and wisdom, as embodied in the eponymous character Stella, a white heroine, speak volumes. In this Bildungsroman, Bergeaud seeks to instil in the two brothers Romulus and Rémus the rudiments of Judeo-Christian civilization under the benevolent eye of their surrogate mother, Stella.

First of all, Stella, although a founding text of the Haitian literary tradition,Footnote ⁵ shows highly modern sensibilities, especially in its treatment of the psychological concerns of the novel’s characters. The novel has long been underestimated, perhaps because of its status as a precursor or avant-garde text. However, Anne Marty rightly speaks of Stella as a true founding story or récit des origines in that it calls for the search for landmarks capable of structuring a collective consciousness, of establishing the feeling of belonging to the same nation.Footnote ⁶

The novel attempts to represent the Haitian Revolution through a set of allegories illustrated by the main characters: the brothers Romulus and Rémus, Marie the African (their biological mother), the Colonist, and Stella (their surrogate mother). Stella’s story begins with a description of the home of this family that humanity has sequestered through its racist violence. The contrast is obvious between the enclosure of this slave family and the opulence of their master’s house. Marie, the African, lives with her two sons. Romulus, the eldest, is Black like her, and Rémus, product of the rape of the mother by the white owner (the Colonist, as he is named in the narrative). The fact that Marie was the mother of the Colonist’s child did not spare her from the visceral cruelty of the system. She was constantly subjected to work in the fields in the worst conditions, and under the merciless eye of the Colonist. Her sons were subjected to the same brutal treatment. One of them was about to get brutally punished for resting a little under a tree due to exhaustion, but the mother intervened and begged the Colonist to punish her instead, a request to which the Colonist assents, and this horror scene is described by the narrator thus:

This horrible murder of their mother, mutilated under the assaults of the commander’s whip, motivates the two brothers to take revenge on the Colonist. They take the path of the mountain to become maroons, as their mother’s final supreme gaze implicitly instructs them. Following a failed skirmish against the Colonist, Stella, the white heroine (who was herself the Colonist’s prisoner), escapes from his house to join the insurgent camp in the mountains. The remainder of the story relates the two brothers’ lengthy preparations and intermittent battles, leading up to their ultimate revenge under the meticulous guide of Stella, and the different antagonisms that oppose them until their indispensable reunion for the definitive battle toward independence. Throughout these journeys, Stella counsels them spiritually and militarily, as she herself partakes in battles to help them gain their freedom and end the yoke of slavery. Romulus and Rémus in turn take on the role of several protagonists, including Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, André Rigaud, Alexandre Pétion, and the Colonist, who allegorizes the evil of the entire slave system.

For this allegorical study of Bergeaud’s work, let us borrow the analytical grid for reading the historical novel offered by critic Sue Peabody.Footnote ⁷ Reading Stella as an allegorical novel is crucial for our understanding on how the author emplots the Haitian Revolution. In that, he makes it clear in his warning to the reader that he wishes the work to be read as fiction, even though it evokes real historical events:

In this warning, Bergeaud bluntly clarifies his theory or vision of the novel by stating that, even absent the severe gravity of history, a novel can be a useful book. The latter, to produce any good, had to be a novel only in form. “It was necessary,” he tells us, “that the truth should be there; that is why we have taken care not to disfigure history.” However, Bergeaud nevertheless draws a clear distinction between history and fiction by the function he attributes to each:

However, the narrator seems to show an inclination or preference for fiction (the novel as a genre in particular) over history, to which the status of truth is assigned while a novel is a deceiving one. As Dafne Duchesne puts it, the narrator’s opposing of history and fiction might serve as an explanation for Bergeaud’s decision to conflate the various leaders involved in the Haitian Revolution into the two brotherly figures, one with light skin (Rémus) and one with dark skin (Romulus), who symbolize racial national cohesion.Footnote ⁸

Analyzing Stella as a historical novel,Footnote ⁹ let us consider three distinct moments that any fiction of this kind embodies, according to Peabody. These moments are the historical past, or the setting of the novel; the time period in which it was written; and the time in which it is read. She makes them distinctively significant through three analogies: fiction as window, fiction as prism, and fiction as mirror.Footnote ¹⁰

Stella and Its Historical Context

The events narrated in Stella take place over a relatively short period of time: a few years before the revolution up to the very beginning of the consolidation of Haitian independence (1789–1804). While it is true that the characters are either collective beings, idealities, or abstractions, to use Bergeaud’s expressions, most of the actions they undertake are known historical events. The Haitian Revolution was anticolonial, antislavery, and anti-white supremacy. It would not have been possible without the union of Blacks and “free gens de couleur” who made up the two largest social groups in the colony of Saint-Domingue.

Aside from the question of colorism that Bergeaud seems to partially incorporate in his account, slavery and the Haitian Revolution, inasmuch as they constituted the dominant issues of the historical period in question, are largely erased in a narrative that the author claimed to be historical. The novel fails, in my opinion, to give a balanced rendition of the quotidian violence and degradation of plantation slavery despite the allusion of Marie’s ordeal during the Middle Passage. The scene of Marie’s violent whipping, quoted in its entirety above, constitutes the sole representation of slavery’s fundamental violence, and functions as the trigger for the revolution. In the novel, the characters’ motivations appear more personal (avenging the mutilation of the body of the heroes’ mother) than collective (generalized rejection of forced labor). In this regard, Duchesne provides more nuances on Bergeaud’s hesitation between novel and history as genres in narrating the Haitian past:

What is at stake in this passage is the relationship between an account of the Haitian Revolution and the pre-revolutionary past or the experience of slavery as such. Duchesne rightly wonders whether this experience should be represented separately or as a precursor to, a catalyst of, or part of the narrative on the Haitian Revolution. She posits in principle that the structural arrangement which places the act of telling stories at the beginning of the novel, in relation to suffering as the driving force of fiction, operates a melancholy shift and transcodification which will have an impact on the novel as a whole:

Bergeaud’s literary reflections within the novel on the limited functions and nature of the historical narrative complicate the debate on the crafting of Stella itself as to why many contentious issues are left unsolved and remain problematic for critics. In this denial of the past of slavery as the basis on which the Haitian Revolution was able to find its rationality, Duchesne goes so far as to say that Stella exemplifies the failure of all national allegories. For her, the text claims to celebrate the humanity and the freedom of the colonized, but fails to recognize the historical relationship between slavery and freedom.Footnote ¹³ Bergeaud’s allegorical fiction (novel) describes the genre as a barbaric transaction, a deceptive lake that hovers over history. According to Duchesne, this is in line with the novel’s self-deprecatory stance and understatement of the Haitian Revolution vis-à-vis the legacy of the French Revolution and the representation of France as a depository of civilization.

This naturalistic analogy with the writing of fiction as anti-modern, and therefore antithetical to civilization, is illustrated throughout the novel to show the unthinkable nature of the revolution by the slaves. The latter could only be an extension of the French Revolution. The construction or orientation of the narration as it is illustrated in the central role attributed to Stella, this white heroine, a messiah of the providence who embodies the French revolutionary ideal, participates in the silencing of the historiography of the revolution of the enslaved, and at the same time reinforces traditional conspiracy theories.

There is reluctance on Bergeaud’s part to name the characters in the story, even though some of their actions can be attributed to known historical figures. The Eurocentric nature of those who are named, Romulus and Rémus as well as Stella, permeates the story in its entirety, even though the various plots allow the unraveling of the ultimate conflict of the story as it relates to the question of color that fuels their rivalries, so to speak.

For Bergeaud, the inherent contradictions of the slave system and the dehumanizing conditions of the slaves seem more futile than the death of Ogé and Chavannes, two free men of color whose memory contributed to the turmoil in Saint-Domingue. The field of the revolution begins at their scaffold, he insists (Stella, 38). The story makes Stella that deus ex machina that the slave revolution needed. It could only be prompted by external forces, made possible by supernatural agents, a divine, miraculous hand, as Trouillot would put it.Footnote ¹⁴ The encounter of the two heroes Romulus and Rémus with the young white heroine Stella therefore constitutes their epiphany. They initially thought of immolating her as an expiatory victim instead of the Colonist to avenge their mother, but the blonde and immaculate beauty of Stella disarms the poor blacks:

The ascending power of the young heroine transforms the two brothers and dampens their revolutionary momentum. They therefore vow to be resubjugated to her who will set the terms of the revolution. The two brothers beg the young white girl to become their adoptive mother, to whom they devote an unwavering worship.

However, Duchesne, commenting on Stella’s discrepant functions in the novel, describes her as a failure of allegorical discourse or a crisis of representation.Footnote ¹⁵ Stella is introduced in the text without a genealogy. She tells us that she had grown singularly in the imagination of the French people. They considered her a fairy and attributed supernatural powers to her. She was exalted as a divinity. That pleased her. But she noticed that the superstitious passion of the people grew more and more excited and quickly spilled over into delirious fever, into veritable frenzy. She describes the terror which followed and which made her flee by throwing herself on the first ship leaving for Saint-Domingue. She left France and the people for whom she represented the ideal of freedom (Stella, 58).

In the emplotment of the novel itself, Stella’s space and role overshadow the twin brothers’ biological mother, Marie the African.Footnote ¹⁶ Stella’s story allegorizes this crisis of re-presentation by making Saint-Domingue this new referent, this extension of the metropolis. The freedom, which the two brothers pursue for their race, according to Stella, was “born in France, that is to say of its revolution, sanctioned by one of its decrees, is legitimately her daughter” (Stella, 168).

In that regard, Duchesne is right to remind us that the white heroine’s “refusal to represent the French Revolution, her acknowledgment of it as a failure, is in contradiction with those parts of the novel where France and the ideals of the revolution are named as the direct source of Haiti’s independence and abolition of slavery.”Footnote ¹⁷ Throughout the narrative there are tropes of silence about the revolutionary potential of the slaves which attribute a host of external causes to the success of their revolution. So exclaims Stella: “I want to fight, and fight in the front row. The cause to which you are going to devote yourself is that of humanity as much as your own. I identified with it. It will perhaps triumph through me. Be confident. Remember that my help was once useful to you” (Stella, 169). The discrepancies and inadequacies are such that the reading of the novel becomes unbearable and somewhat absurd for the informed readers by the very insertion of the character Stella, to the point where her function obstructs any real agency that the subaltern heroes, Romulus and Rémus, should exhibit.

Throughout the story, the narrator reminds its readership of the genealogy of the slave revolution to that of France by assigning the noble origin of freedom to the mother country:

The increased weight given to this filiation is such that it translates into revolutionary violence to the point where Stella, this messenger of justice, says she saw this blood in France and moaned about it. She nevertheless declares that the revolution was not cursed in France; all the more reason it could not be in Saint-Domingue, where it was necessary above all to take into account the many protagonists involved (Stella, 231). Notwithstanding the active part, the faithful commitment of the two brothers Romulus and Rémus to the revolutionary process, Stella, after having accomplished her mission and at the time of her ascension to the heavens, reminds them that the revolution or freedom was primarily a providential work: “The genius of the country has kept its word; I can also say that I held mine. All that exists right now is my work. I am the freedom, the star of nations!” (Stella, 237). It is appropriate here to see in the revolutionary commitments of the main protagonists Romulus and Rémus a certain latent agency which could only be reassured and validated by providence. Daut is right to link the predominant thesis that Bergeaud illustrates in Stella to the belief, very widespread in the transatlantic world, that the defeat of the Napoleonic armies could not be the sole work of slaves, as illustrated in the painting Le Serment des ancêtres by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière.Footnote ¹⁸

Émeric Bergeaud’s Historical Time

Any narrative, whether fictional or historical, is a work situated in ideology and life experience in that it reflects in one way or another the personal history of its author. In other words, a story can, in part or as a whole, be autobiographical. The period in which Stella was written testifies to the concerns of Bergeaud (1818–58), in view of his personal conflicts with the regime in power, the political persecution of the elites (from April 1848 especially) to which he belonged, and ultimately his exile. Stella, seen as a prism as Peabody understands it, can be construed as Bergeaud’s testament to his reading of the Haitian past. Consequently, Bergeaud is not a disinterested novelist, because no novelist is disinterested, and the characters in the story inform us as much as he does of this past through his proximity to the events of the epoch and his direct experience of the different themes that abound in Stella.

But what do we know of Émeric Bergeaud, and how can his political life and ideology inform us about the making of Stella? We only have a few bits of biographical information on Bergeaud. We know that he was born in 1818 in Les Cayes in the south of the country and died in 1858 in Saint-Thomas. We also know that he was the nephew of General Borgella,Footnote ¹⁹ for whom he worked as secretary when the latter was the head of state of the south for a short period of time, probably at the end of the Boyer regime, according to Marty. Bergeaud apparently participated in a rebellion in the south aimed at overthrowing Soulouque’s government around 1848. The latter was able to put down this revolt, but the reprisals by the regime were such that they surely led to his forced exile along with many colleagues of his caste that same year. The literary critic Léon-François Hoffmann in his book Faustin Soulouque d’Haïti reports that as a result of the killings of April 1848 and the brutal repression of disorders in the south, Haitians found themselves subject to a no longer merely authoritarian but truly despotic regime. Soulouque, who came to power thanks to Céligny Ardouin (Beaubrun Ardouin’s brother), promoter of his rise to the presidency, did not hesitate to have a dozen opponents condemned to death and executed, including Céligny. It was at this time, Hoffmann tells us, that the emigration of most of the enlightened men of the country took place.Footnote ²⁰

Moreover, in line with the title of this chapter, Chelsea Stieber offers a counter or contrapuntal reading of Stella in showing what Bergeaud tries to prove through the writing and publication of Stella or what has been left out. Hence the juxtaposition of the concepts of civilization and barbarism, on the one hand, of empire and republic, on the other hand, in Stieber’s analysis of the wars of the pen in which the writers of the exiled republic were thoroughly engaged throughout the nineteenth century, in particular. As we explained beforehand, Bergeaud, given his political quarrels with Soulouque’s government, militates during exile for a republican ideal based on fraternity and the universal values of civilization. However, according to Stieber, Stella must be placed in a global context which intends to respond to Soulouque’s authoritarianism or the Second Empire.Footnote ²¹

Reading Stella in a contrapuntal way allows us to see in all points that it is part of the first conception of civilization and goes against the tide of empire. But a set of contexts – as suggested by Stieber, the civil war, the liberal revolutions of 1848 and their failures on both sides of the Atlantic, the advent of the Soulouque and Napoleonic empires – were decisive in deepening the representations of the exiled Republicans of the revolutionary history of Haiti.Footnote ²²

Here, beyond the narrative problematic pertaining to the points of view of the fictional characters through which the revolution is recounted in an equivocal and ambiguous way (an allegorical rather a historical one), Bergeaud’s point of view is evident in Stella’s emplotment a little more than half a century after the revolution has taken place and informs us of his position as an actor and interested observer.

The Reading of Stella Today

But to rephrase Peabody’s question in using it as a mirror, what is the impact of our present time on reading historical fiction like Stella?

In the current context where the issue of race is the most discussed and fiercely debated (especially in the United States) and seems unavoidable in interdisciplinary fields, how can we not take into account this first novel that deals with a revolution which was largely fought over questions of race and racism?Footnote ²³ How can Stella inform us paradoxically about the Haitian past, in terms of race, that it tries to conceal? How can the text be used as a mirror to reflect the long-lasting legacy of colorism in Haitian society? How can it bring new insights, especially with the recent English edition, in the fields of Haitian Studies, Modern Revolutions, Transatlantic Studies, Caribbean Studies, Gender Studies, and so forth?

Bergeaud’s novel turns out to be a teaching tool of great importance for a metacognitive exercise which obliges the reader to bring his/her own experiences to the comprehension of the text. As Peabody stresses, “A truly effective history lesson should not only instruct students about the events of the past but also ask them to reflect on how they have been shaped by their historical context.”Footnote ²⁴ Critics have pointed out the many ways Stella can be used as a teaching resource in History, Cultural, and Literary Studies classes, or in any of the above fields mentioned earlier, for a better understanding of the figural representations of the Haitian Revolution.Footnote ²⁵

The dominant theme of Stella is racial unity or reconciliation. As such, it can give rise to a thorough discussion of whether or not a raceless rendition of the Haitian revolutionary past by Bergeaud is an accurate one. Daut’s characterization of Bergeaud’s project, beyond its merit, can be contrasted with that of Stieber when the former states that “Bergeaud’s description of Haitian revolutionary history as a fraternal romance, then, rather than an unfortunate interracial drama of monstruous hybridity, projects not only an altogether idealist future for Haiti, but an almost entirely raceless one.”Footnote ²⁶ The story can also be a good place to explore the literary trope of the “tragic mulatto,” as the plot goes against the traditional ambiguous portrayal of this racial grouping. If the new republic has long been emblematic to this tragic stereotype of the “mulatto,” Stella, as Daut puts it, goes against that long-held belief: “Stella refuses this seemingly un-redemptive narrative of Haiti as a tragic hybrid republic by refuting popular nineteenth-century ideas about the mulatto on the one hand, and by rebuking the hatred inspired by the fact of Haiti’s existence on the other.”Footnote ²⁷

Indeed, Bergeaud’s Stella, while stressing the color line divide through the Colonist’s voice to set the two brothers apart, succeeds in realizing the racial unity toward independence. However, this ad hoc racial reconciliation was interrupted by the assassination of the founder of the nation, a fact that is not within the scope of the novel. Hence, the importance of color prejudice has been a constant in Haitian history. Haitian social history allows us to observe that belonging to the black race has never been an issue for Haitians, whether blacks or mulattoes. The division is rather of the order of caste or colorism. This is why David Nicholls states that “it was not only during the period of the United States occupation that race became a divisive factor in Haiti itself.”Footnote ²⁸ If a raceless Haiti was an idealist project and was in fact fulfilled as the 1805 Dessalinean constitution established or officialized it, then colorism, as an avatar of race, has continued to have its dreadful effects on Haitian society since its inception. In that regard, Pap Ndiaye, in La Condition noire, citing Verna M. Keith and Cedric Herring in Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community, says, “the effects of skin color are not just historical curiosities inherited from slavery and racism, but current mechanisms that influence who has what in America.”Footnote ²⁹

This prowess of the revolution to get rid of race that unfolds in Stella has also not been able to wipe out colorism, so much so that it constitutes a major stake in the outcome of the story. Stella exposes the dangers of color prejudice and pride and foreshadows Haiti’s contemporary conflicts. The narrator relates these words of the Colonist, who seeks to fuel the tensions between the two brothers as follows:

Bergeaud seems, through the narrator’s voice, to repudiate in good faith what is vulgarly called the question of color by showing what is hidden behind this heated issue in stating, “Epidermal prejudices are malicious stupidities; hatred of color is a lie: we hate in others, when we know how to hate, merit, virtues, goods that we do not have; one does not hate its color” (Stella, 116). This phenotypic crime dies hard in societies of slave ancestry. A discussion around the way the issue is addressed in Stella in light of other fictional texts can inform us about the present conditions.Footnote ³⁰ That reminds me of a passage in Stephen Alexis’s Le Nègre masqué in which he sought to compel the Haitian elites to exorcize their denial of the issue by having Pascal Darty, Roger’s comrade in the struggle, say, “Le préjugé de couleur en Haïti, c’est comme l’Alsace quand la France ne l’avait pas reprise: ‘Pensons-y toujours, n’en parlons jamais!’” (The color prejudice in Haiti is like Alsace when France had not taken it back: “Let’s always think about it, never talk about it!”).Footnote ³¹

Stella may be the subject of another contentious point for what it represents as a literary document, an avant-garde text or a product of a pioneering era whose status still blurs criticism. As I indicated at the very beginning, the text presents difficulties for classification; it lies at the border of several genres. Readers could start reflecting on the fictional and historical status of Stella which Bergeaud sets out in his disclaimer in light of critics’ characterization. Christiane Ndiaye, on the other hand, offers a robust analysis of the epic character of the story while showing its modern and postmodern dimensions.Footnote ³² She argues to this end that Bergeaud is in fact entering fully into modernity by creating a hybrid text dominated by the epic without excluding elements of polyphony and metadiscursiveness more characteristic of modern literary writing … or even postmodern, if you will.Footnote ³³ Quoting Édouard Glissant, Ndiaye further argues that Stella is in fact a modern epic in the sense that it is less of a story of glory than that of an ambiguous victory. It is the very inconsistency of the text that makes it modern, and it can claim to be Creole before the letter by the inclusion of the periphrasis which will become after more than a century the motto of the proponents of the Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant.Footnote ³⁴ Contrary to these creolists, Bergeaud glorifies fraternity by concluding his story as follows: “civilization is not exclusive; it attracts instead of repelling. It is through it that the alliance of mankind must be made. Thanks to its all-powerful influence, there will soon be no blacks, whites, yellows, Africans, Europeans, Asians, or Americans on earth; there will be brothers” (Stella, 248).

Stella, may, in the final analysis, frustrate some readers and attract others. The ambiguous role assigned to Stella as the main character of the story, the clichés and various preconceived ideas of the colonial discourse she puts forward, the promotion of Christian values expose Bergeaud’s civilizing project with regard to his silence on popular religion, Vodou, and other historical distortions.