Of Epigrammatology (3)

#26, December 15, 2003

Words Worthy of a Martyr

There’s not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee…

– William Wordsworth, To Toussaint L’Ouverture

I used this epigraph in an essay on Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kolhaas and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, (see #25, The Common Wind) because I wanted to link the self-destructive, suicidal resistance of both Kolhaas and Michael Coalhouse, Jr. to the “common wind” mentioned by William Wordsworth. But there was more to be found in these words than this alone. Here one witnessed arguably the most important English romantic poet waxing lyrical on the rebellion in Haiti. I and other school kids were brought up in England to believe that the romantic poets had largely focused on nature, and if they ever did stretch to politics it was either in the form of a harking back to traditional rural England, or a momentary infatuation with the French Revolution. That they might have even known anything about the plight of slaves in the French Caribbean, or anywhere else for that matter, would remain beyond our ken. Yet, in these words, the empire and the descendent of Africa were found right at the heart of European culture.

This epigraph from Wordsworth’s poem for Toussaint L’Ouverture speaks to the condition of martyrdom that western nations are now doing so much to promote. It might seem odd, at first glance, to think that an English Romantic poet would have found much to praise in Toussaint. Yet this is not so much about praise as it is about the realization that the European endeavor to shackle the descendents of Africa would inevitably unleash forces that would never be fully contained. The rebel only needed to breathe “the common wind” to gain sustenance. This points to the fundamental fallacy that has governed Euro-American global policy ever since. Systems that are felt to be oppressive by those who inhabit them cannot be sustained by war and force. How much more is this so, when that common wind is bolstered by the fact that those who would contain local insurgencies endeavor to do so in the name of freedom and democracy?