"Lives Are Not Novels": On Writing the Story of Haiti’s First and Last King, Henry Christophe

Echoing the St. Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott’s characterization of Haiti’s king Henry Christophe as a “squalid fascist” who “chained [his] own people,” so many writers have searched in vain for a lesson in Christophe’s 1820 suicide. In his novel, The Kingdom of This World, Swiss-born Cuban author Alejo Carpentier gave recourse to the legends of 19th-century British travelers to explain how quickly all the king’s men turned against him: “The bulls’ blood that those thick walls [of the Citadelle] had drunk was an infallible charm against the arms of the white men. But this blood had never been directed against Negroes, whose shouts, coming closer now, were invoking Powers to which they made blood sacrifice.” Likewise, just before he kills himself in Dan Hammerman’s 1945 Henri Christophe, produced for the American Negro Theatre in New York City, the overwrought Haitian monarch judges himself in reflecting, “I don’t know, maybe it’s because a man has no right being a king in the first place.” The king of Haiti’s tragic death is one of the most dramatized episodes in Haitian history—the scene appears in multiple Walcott plays as well as in Aimé Césaire’s famous La Tragédie du roi Christophe, and in plays by William Edgar Easton, J.H. Amherst, and Seldon Rodman. Yet as Arlette Farge reminds us, “Lives are not novels, and for those who have chosen to write history...the stakes are not fictional.” This paper will explore how the tendency of historians and artists alike to portray Christophe’s downfall as inevitable has obscured the intricate personal and political events that led to his dramatic demise, making him one of the least understood heads of state in the Americas.