Accounting for the Haitian Independence Debt in Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey’s Combats

This article analyzes Haitian novelist Néhemy Pierre-Dahomey’s Combats Pierre-Dahomey (Citation2021), the only historical novel to look back on mid-nineteenth century Haiti and to attempt to represent the lived social consequences of the Haitian independence debt. It treats Combats as a prehistory of the Haitian present (to paraphrase Lukacs); Pierre-Dahomey’s novel points to the nineteenth century and the debt, not the Revolution, as perhaps the most relevant historical parallel to contradictions in contemporary Haitian society: a period in which the Haitian people must, in their daily existence, suffer the material consequences of the debt forced upon them by a very distant France (completely absent from the narrative) and the barely less distant Haitian state under the government of Jean-Pierre Boyer. The article traces and analyzes Pierre-Dahomey’s representation of the ways in which this far-off political-economic relation trickles into and comes to permeate and overdetermine the lifeworld of this peasant community. It concludes by considering the alternative symbolic economies that the novel offers against this neocolonial debt-creditor relation, focusing on the lakou model and also on the free exchange of stories in the Haitian narrative practice of lodyans.