Hacking as a Methodology for Post-Colonial Studies in Haitian Literature

Scholars working with the legacies of the ancient Greco-Roman world continually wrestle with the question of what methodology best suits the analysis of material that appears in both colonial and anti-colonial discourses. As the title of my forthcoming monograph advertises, Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature uses the concept of hacking as the lens through which to study how Haitian authors have engaged ancient Greco-Roman material. In this presentation, I introduce the concept of hacking before offering examples of how Haitian authors have hacked “classical” material.

The term hacking comes pre-loaded with an array of competing associations. For example, the colonial and revolutionary histories of Haiti hinge economically on the hacking of sugarcane stalks, and modern information technology understands hacking both in terms of data piracy and as a form of anti-hierarchical innovation. I complement such notions with two further frameworks. First is the feminist discussion of hacking human subjectivity by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2018), which describes an alchemy creating new subjectivities through a process of dissolution and reconfiguration. Second, my title comes from Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who describes his career in terms of “taking a hip-hop sensibility and transposing it, in hacking classical forms” (2020). Such a hip-hop sensibility encompasses several other valences of hacking while focusing on specifically verbal artistry. One apt example of this method can be heard in the Haitian hip-hop duo D-Fi Powèt Revòlte and Ken-Fs whose “Veni, Vidi, Vici” (2020) hacks a number of verbal, linguistic, and historical contexts with the lines mouri an brav, viv lib / veni, vidi, amavi, vici (kreyòl: “die brave, live free” / Latin: “I came, I saw, I loved, I conquered”).

Haiti offers an ideal context for post-colonial studies since it claims to be the world’s first post-colonial nation. Established in 1804, after more than a decade of violent rebellion against slavery and colonial France, Haiti immediately faced neo-colonial challenges rooted generally in U.S.-European fears of Black liberation as a threat to established racial hierarchies and specifically in the 1825 indemnity (signed with France and later transferred to the U.S.), which shackled Haiti’s economic development and directly contributed to Haiti’s current instability (Obregòn). Yet Haiti’s post-colonial status is also complicated by its colonial expansion across the entire island of Hispaniola, which generated lasting resentment in the Dominican Republic (Maitbag, Eller), and through the practice of caporalisme agraire (“militarized agriculture”), which Toussaint Louverture formalized in his Constitution of 1800 and which approximated enslavement by forcing free citizens to work on plantations patrolled by Black Haitian soldiers (Louverture, Sacchi and Ravano; Trouillot).

After framing my approach to hacking and Haiti’s post-colonial history, I close with a thumb-nail description of how Edwidge Danticat has hacked the Aeneid, Virgil’s imperial epic, in The Farming of Bones (1998) and the myth of Antigone (2010). Danticat’s contrasting approaches to these two points of Greco-Roman reference highlight the flexibility of her verbal artistry that is devoted to the alchemy (da Silva) of hacking new, resilient, and responsive manifestations of Haitian literary identity.