Haitian Independence and the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora

Over seventy years ago in January 1952, Derek Walcott’s Henri Christophe opened in London. The Saint Lucian poet and playwright attended the play a week before he turned twenty-two. This London performance featured many students who would become celebrated in Caribbean culture, art, and politics. Assembling at a theatre within easy walking distance of both Buckingham Palace and Westminster, they dramatised the early years of Haitian independence. In defiance of institutions that had overseen their own colonisation for hundreds of years, these men narrated the political struggle that ensued after the deaths of three prominent Haitian leaders: Toussaint Louverture in 1803, Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, and Henri Christophe in 1820.

Trinidadian artist Carlisle Chang designed the set and costumes for Henri Christophe’s London debut, and some of his sketches have been preserved along with his personal papers at the Alma Jordan Library, University of the West Indies at St. Augustine. Born in 1921, Chang grew up in San Juan, Trinidad, and worked in many media, including paint, silkscreen, printmaking, costume design, ceramics, and copperwork, throughout the course of his life. In 1975, he designed the costumes for Carnival’s winning mas band, which featured “We Kind Ah People,” including the many peoples and ecologies of Trinidad and Tobago: “We Hot Sun,” “Sand, Sea, Surf,” “We Market Vendors,” “Cane Fire,” “We Kite Season,” “We Ibis,” “We Birds of Paradise,” “We Caribs,” “We Parang,” “We Cockfight,” “We Poui,” “We African Heritage,” “We Limbo,” “We Pan,” “We Chinee,” and “We Indian Dancers.”

As I reviewed the folders that constitute Chang’s archive, I found pen outline and watercolour drawings, paired with tiny fabric swatches previewing the radiant garb he planned for the male cast of Henri Christophe. For the role of Alexandre Pétion, played by the Guyanese playwright Frank Pilgrim, Chang created long cream pants, a long-tailed light brown military jacket, and a dark brown waist sash with yellow cords hanging from the shoulders. For Jean-Jacques Dessalines, interpreted by Jamaican architectural student Victor Patterson, he invented a long-tailed deep green jacket with gilded embroidery, yellow epaulets, a pink silk shoulder sash, long black boots featuring golden tassels, a short sword, and a long scabbard. Finally, for Trinidadian actor and playwright Errol John’s transformation into King Henri Christophe during act two, Chang created a blue grey waistcoat, a long embroidered maroon jacket with light blue bows on each shoulder, white pants, and tall black boots with golden tassels. Dressed by a Sino-Trinidadian artist, Black men from around the Anglophone Caribbean joined together to narrate the early history of nineteenth-century Haiti while they fought for independence in their respective homelands.

Chang read and researched Trinidadian history in order to create his artwork, and his papers indicate he noted that Chinese men had arrived in 1806 Port of Spain, a fact that Eric Williams had recorded in his History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (1962). In the early nineteenth century, colonial proposals for Atlantic abolition took shape through European observation of intra-Asian migration in the Indian Ocean and ongoing Black insurrection in the Caribbean. As such, British and French colonial administrators attempted Asian conscription to the South Atlantic, resulting in the arrival of Chinese men in 1806 Trinidad, 1810 St. Helena, and 1820 French Guiana, as well as a range of proposals in 1807, 1811, 1815, 1826, 1828, and 1832. In other words, as small numbers of Chinese men eked out lives in early nineteenth-century Trinidad, St. Helena, and French Guiana, European administrators, planters, and parliamentarians continuously entertained the prospect of transporting Chinese laborers to the Caribbean.