Dessalines Comments on L’Ouverture’s End
Le Clerc outfoxed L’Ouverture.
Our General climbed onto the fleur-de-lys brig
to paper together Peace,
and was corralled at once
and carted to France,
to go maggoty in a prison,
without ever kissing Napoléon.
His Vanity was his stupidity.
Regard how I cut the French impressive wounds;
I do the foe blushing, gushing injury.
Black Death, sticky as fire,
drags down the chalk soldiery.
I reduce Le Clerc’s battalions
to dirty phantoms,
dead, but groaning up grim hurts first.
My dark throng—as cut-throat as Crusaders—
metes out such Torture,
the Versailles troop fall back as rabble;
their uniforms retreat as rags.
Thus, I survey wastes of unburied epaulettes.
The sunshine of captured cannon, gleaming,
as they puff clouds of Death at our foes.
Our gunpowder is as good as salt
to the bedraggled, beleaguered white corpses.
(Their guts burst open,
spilling grime.)
We are devastating hordes,
collapsing a pallid Tyrant—
Napoléon
(no longer leonine,
but nappy).
Due to our tumultuous, rigorous massacres,
his Army is tattered cadavers,
curtailed anatomies.
I see them strewn,
reduced to a paralyzed trickle.
Fallen in Haiti now
are French kings and philosophers,
for our blades and bullets tuck into their innards.
They flee who can—
the fugitive gentry.
Let them own only their lives—
no more slaves;
or they’ll feel
steel swish through each fat face,
from cheeks down to the neck,
and our hooves splash open their bellies,
leaving black shambles, a putrid stew.
[Ilonojaa (Finland) 2 juillet mmxiv]
A French Slaveholder Revises the Revolution
Icy machetes slice crows’ necks:
Each massacre’s a Black Mass—
a grave pudding.
Our blows lop heads and limbs:
The bits flop down—
in impersonal—yet intimate—avalanches,
ruddy, dark globs.
Metaphorically speaking, we Bourbons—
guzzling white-light Barbancourt rum—
sup on nigger testicles,
dine on negress tits.
(Boudin is a black bull’s belly
eviscerated—
innards gushing, spilling,
in a bitter wash,
an orchid cider)
We’re not bland mandarins:
We hip-hip-hooray through gore,
dip the Tricolore in red floods,
in Saint-Domingue, in Martinique, in Guadeloupe—
wherever Slavery
sets right—
i.e. rewrites—
“The Rights of Man”….
[Hantsport (Nova Scotia) 6 août mmxiii]
The Liberation of Creole (1841)
Twas a slate-grey, relentless sea,
salt-fringed,
a quenchless sea churning with sparks,
tireless gleaming….
Even the ship, Creole, seemed burnished—
like a coffin—
as it sped,
spitting through the vast element,
to carry th’African cargo to markets
where every “pound of flesh,”
muscle and sinew—
is pressed and wrung
for every ounce of sweat
(to yield ounce upon ounce
of gold)
in South Sea, Carib Sea,
or in groves bristling with cane
or cotton.
(This is Slavery’s clanging forté:
To let clans clank in chains,
stoop backs to whips,
bend head and heart to iron-hard work,
to clear white-milk clouds
of cotton
from fields brimming to the horizon,
or to clench and cut sugar cane.)
Always, however, in The Middle Passage,
soon or late,
a calm sea—
a sea with waves like smooth ruins—
yields to hurricane-whipped, pitch-black waves….
Aboard the Creole, then, crew and cargo
united in belch and vomit—
and in bruising and bleeding—
as white and black beings tossed hard
against hard-and-fast bulkheads
and other fastenings, outfitting,
furniture, and fixtures.
The cleaving pitch of ship
burst open the hold where th’Africans
had been hoarded, grouped, groped,
but now, liberated—
as when a cloudburst overcomes ramparts—
and so, grabbing and grasping any tool at hand,
went quick to sanguine work,
cutting down the captain, sailors,
slashing and goring and stabbing
as haphazardly successful
as they could reasonably be.
A fast sword made cap’n’s chest spurt;
his guts skittered, skittish,
as the ship danced in a glittering blizzard
of foam,
and shrieks scraped at ears,
and bloody liquor swabbed the decks
as the oceanic rain rinsed
and/or flooded….
Twas dreaded, grim Onslaught.
As lightning hurled—the night aflash
and aflame with it,
th’Africans executed the relentless plunging
of swords and knives, axes and pikes,
or wielded iron, skull-busting chains,
showing black in the blanching lightning
as they conjured a fatal Victory—
The crew massacred, yes,
but the ship’s sails still stretched cross the night,
and with no stern hand at bow or stern,
guiding,
could pitch down fathoms,
thanks to the crest of a bloodcurdling,
banshee-thundering, tidal wave—
just as an earthquake swallows
a shipment of wine.
Those were nervous winds
when the triumphant Africans
prowled among the foam-polished cadavers
of the crew,
finding only one sailor still breathing,
sill fit to steer Creole:
To Africa,
to the sleep of fat lions, well-fed,
where women stake a vineyard—
the freedom of the vineyard—
pluck the grapes once vintage,
and palm wine gleams ambrosial.
[Kingston (Ontario) 26 juillet mmxv]
* Pace Senghor.
* Armed with shields, daggers, and spears, a Zulu force destroyed gun-toting, British soldiers at Isandlwana, South Africa, in 1879.
