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the history of haiti turns on myths like that which circulated not only for reasons dippin outlines above, but also to justify the marginalization of haiti from the revolution forward. a kind of giant punishment for the revolutionaries having the audacity to imagine that things like the declaration of the rights of man applied to them. so of course its a racist myth---it's the same kind of thing as a blood libel story.
think about it: you had an economy predicated on slave labor and populations of slaves that exceeded that of the colonial slave-owning class and in haiti there's a Revolution, and a successful revolution that in the process enacts alot of the slave-owning class's worst nightmares about what might happen to them for, o i dunno, treating human beings are things? owning them? in the carribean in particular, amongst sugar plantations, the mortality rate about about 90%...so this was brutal system in every way---and it got burned to the ground. so of COURSE the "pact with the devil" myth is racist because it comes out of a system that was in itself obviously racist as part of a reaction informed by racism to people who were the objects of racism successfully fighting back.
so the "true" part of the myth is that it circulated AS A MYTH---and that is the only way in which the story "happened"
and dippin's right about voudoun. i would have though this common knowledge at this point.
sheesh.
the irony is that pat robertson for all his idiocy is working with more a sense of historical context that the television talking heads and more us journalists/editorial writers.
it's stunning to me that anyone would defend the myth....not even robertson, but the myth.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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