1996 – Coda: (The Heinl Coda — Somewhere Today Is a Haitian Who Feels He Alone Can Right Things, the Assize of Arms, Daniel O’Connell on the History of Irela…

1996 – Coda: (The Heinl Coda — Somewhere Today Is a Haitian Who Feels He Alone Can Right Things, the Assize of Arms, Daniel O’Connell on the History of Ireland Traced Like a Wounded Man Through a Crowd by the Blood, That Is the History of Haiti, and the Question — Are the Haitian People Doomed Always to Repeat a History That Is Written in Blood?): Somewhere today, in Haiti, Santo Domingo, New York, or Paris, is a Haitian who feels that he alone can right things in his country. Whether by the constitution, or the second occupation, or the quirks of fate, he feels that which should have been his has been deprived him. For the sake of the nation, he will feel bound by the assize of arms to take up weapons to seize his country’s leadership. Daniel O’Connell once said that the history of Ireland could be traced like a wounded man through a crowd, by the blood. That is the history of Haiti. Are the Haitian people, living endlessly in a perverse continuum, oblivious of their past, doomed always to repeat a history that is written in blood? The question with which the Heinls closed their monumental chronicle — posed as if the answer were self-evident, as if the blood were the only thread connecting five centuries of Haitian history — was itself the final expression of the imperial gaze that had shaped their narrative from first page to last: a gaze that could see the blood but not the resistance it nourished, that could trace the wound but not the body that survived it, that could catalog every coup and every massacre while missing the deeper truth that a people who had achieved the only successful slave revolution in human history, who had sustained a national identity through two centuries of isolation, invasion, occupation, and internal tyranny, who had created a language, a religion, a music, and a literature out of the wreckage of the Middle Passage, were not doomed to repeat anything — they were, as they had always been, engaged in the unfinished work of becoming what no enslaved people had ever before become: a sovereign nation, the first Black republic, the permanent reproach to every empire that had ever claimed dominion over African flesh. The blood was real. But so was the life it carried.