>> Vieux-Chauvet’s novel instead provides portraits of diverse individuals—free people of African descent, enslaved people, white slave owners and white actors,

>> Vieux-Chauvet’s novel instead provides portraits of diverse individuals—free people of African descent, enslaved people, white slave owners and white actors, parents and children. >> The evocation of the ways in which women sought out space, autonomy, and futures for themselves and their families in the colonial order makes the book particularly powerful. This article (and presumably the book it draws from) seems to want to paint revolutionary Haiti as a kind of multicultural, proto-feminist paradise. Instead, the slave revolt led to the torture, rape, and ultimately complete genocide of the nation's remaining European-derived population, including women and children, and the slumping of one of the wealthiest colonies of North America into what it is today: one of the poorest places on the continent[1]: "Dessalines later gave the order to all cities on Haiti that all white men should be put to death." "Dessalines would proclaim an amnesty for all the whites who had survived in hiding during the massacre. When these people left their hiding place, however, they were killed as well." "[T]he majority of the women were initially not killed. Dessalines's advisers, however, pointed out that the white Haitians would not disappear if the women were left to give birth to white men, and after this, Dessalines gave order that the women should be killed as well, with the exception of those who agreed to marry non-white men." Far from paradisiacal... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre