The Mechanisms of Isolation: The Life and Thought of Yves Montas

Nathalie Batraville. “The Mechanisms of Isolation: The Life and Thought of Yves Montas.” The CLR James Journal. Special issue: Black Canadian Thought 20:1–2, Fall 2014, p. 115–138. Link to article: http://www.pdcnet.org/clrjames/content/clrjames_2014_0020_41641_0115_0138 This copy is for reading only; to cite this article, please consult the journal.

N. Batraville. The CLR James Journal. 20:1–2, Fall 2014, 115–138. 2

The Mechanisms of Isolation: The Life and Thought of Yves Montas

“The landless peasant is a pariah,” wrote Yves Montas in 1962, in an essay he ultimately

published over a decade later under the pseudonym Jean Luc, entitled “Contribution to

the Study of Relations of Production in the Haitian Countryside”1 (Luc 1976b, 37). The

“pariah” metaphor is one of many Montas mobilized throughout his writings that show a

marked concern with the political isolation of Haitian agrarian workers. Economist by

day, essayist by night, his engagement with Haitian Socialist parties between 1968 and

1976 reaches from the last years of François Duvalier’s presidency (1957–1971) to the

beginning of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s subsequent reign (1971–1986). The history of

socialism under Duvalier remains to be written; Montas’ contribution to Haitian political

thought likewise has not yet been established. In the late 1960s, Montas was in exile in

Quebec, a Canadian province with a growing community of Haitian professionals and

intellectuals. During this time, his personal and collaborative writings contributed to a

renewed transnational debate about the possibility of a Haitian Socialist revolution, the

most effective means by which to achieve this objective, and the problems any such

discussion needed to address.

Examining the representations of economic and political isolation in Montas’

pamphlets and essays sheds light on the articulation and development in Haiti of a

national narrative about exploitation, imperialism, alienation, and the Haitian

bourgeoisie. This analysis shows that for Montas, the spatial, economic and political

1 “Contribution à l’étude des rapports de production dans les campagnes haïtiennes.” The title will be shortened to “Contribution to the Study of Relations of Production” in the rest of the essay.


isolation of agrarian workers resulted from and was structured by economic and political

ties with major Haitian landowners, exporters, factory owners, and other members of the

Haitian bourgeoisie. This study of his works is part of a larger project which aims to

examine this period through the treatment writers gave to isolation in literature. Montas’

conceptualization of, on the one hand, the political isolation of agrarian workers, and on

the other, the implications of this isolation, relied in part on his choice of specific

metaphors. These metaphors reveal tensions within the notion of isolation itself and

invite a theorization of political isolation. Furthermore, his use of formal literary devices

was rooted in a commitment to the development of a revolutionary socialist praxis in

Haiti and for Haitians. In Montas’ view, Haitian communists faced an impasse since the

revolution of 1946 and could no longer freely critique the Haitian bourgeoisie. His

critique of socialist parties in Haiti past and present provides an entry point not only into

conversations about socialism, imperialism, and isolation, but also into the corresponding

networks that connected intellectuals working to transform the parameters of knowledge

production about Haiti, to overcome the limitations of the political conjecture of the

1960s and to transform Haitian society. This essay begins with an account of Yves

Montas’ life, his intellectual journey, and the diasporic community of writers he engaged

with while living in Montreal.2

Early Years

According to celebrated novelist and essayist Dany Laferrière, Yves Montas was

“the most formidable critic of his generation.”3 He was born in Haiti in 1931 – just three

years before the end of the U.S. Marines’ nineteen-year occupation of the country and the

2 This biographical account would not have been possible without the invaluable contribution of Marie-Lucie Montas Jean, Montas’ sister, and Claude Moïse, his lifelong friend. 3 Email communication, December 28th 2013.


founding of Haiti’s first Communist party.4 The son of a lawyer, he came of age in a

petit-bourgeois family. As he revealed in the preface to his collection of essays, for “a

certain period of time,” he adhered to the ideology of noirisme (176a, 11). This ideology

interpreted the stark inequality in Haiti as stemming from structures of exploitation

inherited since slavery and the colonial era and later reinforced during the American

occupation. Within these structures, light-skinned Haitians (so-called “mulattos”) would

have benefitted from social, economic, and political privileges, while exploiting the black

majority. As Matthew Smith recalls in Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and

Political Change 1934-1957, the noiristes considered that racial prejudice was

responsible for the disenfranchisement of the dark-skinned majority, and required, in

order to be abolished, a social, cultural, and political affirmation of Haiti’s African

heritage (2009, 25). It is unclear whether Montas’ rupture with this doctrine occurred

during the rule of noiriste Dumarais Estimé (1946-1950), or thereafter. It is possible he

came to Socialist thought in the 1950s or even the 1960s.

When, in December of 1953, he left his home with a scholarship to study in

France, Haiti was under the military rule of Paul Magloire (1950-1956) (Haiti Sun 1953,

13). Matthew Smith describes how Magloire’s administration, resolutely anti-communist

from its very beginning, went so far as to reduce the amount of scholarships awarded for

studying in France because he believed French communists were corrupting the minds of

Haitian students pursuing their studies abroad (Smith 2009 156). Montas nevertheless

attended the prestigious École nationale d’administration, in Paris, studying Public

4 Jacques Roumain formed the Parti communiste haïtien in 1934 along with other Marxist Haitian intellectuals, namely Étienne Charlier and Anthony Lespès. Roumain and Charlier wrote the party’s program and entitled it Analyse schématique 32-34. This Marxist critique of Haitian society remained a reference in Haiti for young Marxists for decades.


Administration and Economics. According to his friend Claude Moïse, a Haitian historian

who now lives in Quebec, living in France played a role in shifting his political views

towards socialism and eventually towards a critique of Haitian socialist parties. This

critique came to maturity during noiriste François Duvalier’s regime, in the 1960s,

through exchanges with friends in Port-au-Prince.

With his education complete, Montas returned to Haiti during the period of

political turmoil that characterized the transition between the ousting of Paul Magloire in

December of 1956 and the election of François Duvalier on September 12th 1957.5

Montas eventually found a place as public servant within François Duvalier’s

government. Duvalier instituted the Superior Court of Audits, an independent

governmental organization, when he rewrote the Haitian constitution in 1957.6 This court

oversaw the state’s expenses and revenues and Montas held the position of auditor in its

offices. Like many others, he had to negotiate a vulnerable and contradictory position

given his place within the government and the critiques he began formulating with his

friends behind closed doors. In 1961, Claude Moïse first met Montas in Port-au-Prince at

the home of their mutual friend, Jean Joubert Claude.7 Not long before this encounter, in

December of 1960, the National Haitian Students’ Union had organized a strike that had

lasted five months. By the time Moïse and Montas met, there was a palpable climate of

resistance and feverish optimism and the new friends discussed the student strike

underway, the general political conjecture, and alternatives to the Duvalier regime. While

Montas never took part in any overtly political activities beyond his writings, Moïse

5 Marie-Lucie Montas Jean also places his return around 1956-1957 (phone interview). 6 All translations, unless indicated, are my own. When given, original is in the footnotes: “Cour supérieure des comptes.” 7 Union Nationale des Étudiants Haïtiens


argues that the economist’s critique of Haiti’s political structure and of the Left’s place

within it, his analysis of Haiti’s class structure, and his understanding of the country’s

economic structure were largely born of earnest discussions with fellow intellectuals in

Port-au-Prince. However, Montas only published social and political commentaries once

he was in the U.S. and then Canada. Before he left the country, Montas had published

two compelling pieces in the Haitian press: the first in 1962, in which he responded to a

book written by Manigat regarding one of Haiti’s first presidents, Alexandre Pétion, and

the second was on the young poet Yves Antoine, published in 1964. During the seven

years he spent in Haiti between his return from France and his exile, Montas and his

friends kept a low profile but developed a critique of Haitian society and political thought

that he would then put into print once forced to live in the Diaspora.

Writing in Exile

Montas’ self-imposed exile from Haiti resulted from a multiplicity of factors. A

major concern for him was his brother Roland’s disappearance. Roland Montas was a

lawyer who had been an active supporter of the 1957 presidential candidate Clément

Jumelle. He was working as chancellor for Bishop Alfred Voegeli, who was the head of

the Episcopal Church in Haiti. The day after Duvalier expelled the bishop from Haiti on

charges of insubordination, Montas’ brother was arrested. The arrest took place in April

of 1964, and Roland Montas was killed in prison in September of that same year

(Nicholls 1996, 225). Montas was profoundly shaken by his brother’s death and feared

being persecuted by the tonton macoutes, Duvalier’s paramilitaries. During that same

year, Duvalier declared himself president for life and conducted a mass killing in the city

of Jérémie when Jeune Haïti, a group of young people who were from that town, tried to


overthrow his regime. Montas fled the country’s brutal regime sometime after these

events, joining Duvalier’s first extensive wave of Haitian exiles, composed primarily of

professionals and intellectuals. During the early years of his exile, he lived in Brooklyn

and was a French teacher (American Association of Teachers of French 1968, 1058). He

eventually moved to Canada and divided his time between Quebec City, where he

worked for the provincial government as an economist, and Montreal, where he spent

time with other Haitian intellectuals.

Whether in exile or pursuing studies in Cuba, Mexico, the U.S., France or

Canada, Haitians contributed from beyond Haiti’s borders to the struggle on the ground

against the dictatorship and for a socialist revolution, and one of the major fronts they

identified was knowledge production. While on the one hand, the articles, journals, theses

and books contributed to creating Haiti discursively, they simultaneously created new

forms of national belonging for Haitians living abroad and alternative modes of resistance

to Duvalier’s violent order. The terrain of knowledge was increasingly populated, as an

alternative locus of power for those in exile. This engagement also took place in a context

where in Haiti, state terror greatly limited freedom of expression, especially when it came

to communist ideas.

Whether in Haiti or New York, Montas found groups of committed exhiled

militants. In 1969, a year after the distribution of his first two pamphlets in New York

City, he founded the Haitian Circle for Socialist Studies (Cercle haïtien d’études

socialistes) – the CHES – in Montreal, with six other intellectuals, including Claude

Moïse. Moïse later pointed out in an essay entitled “Theorists of the Revolutionary


Movement and Haitian Social Formation”8 that it was the CHES and especially the work

of Montas that sparked a discussion on the conceptual problems within the Haitian

socialist movement at the turn of the 1970s (Moïse 1972, 120). At the time, the organized

socialist resistance in Haiti was in a state of flux. It still operated clandestinely, with a

new Socialist party born in 1966: the Parti des Travailleurs Haïtiens. Three years later,

the fusion of two other socialist parties, the Parti d’Entente Populaire (PEP) and the Parti

Uni des Démocrates Haïtiens, led to the creation the Parti Unifié des Communistes

Haïtiens (PUCH).9 The CHES drafted an essay collectively that took the form of a letter

to the PUCH. The letter was printed in January 1970, in the form of a booklet, under the

title “Open Letter to the Unified Haitian Communists’ Party.”10 The essay was a critique

not only of the PUCH, but also of the Haitian communist movement going back several

decades. The CHES traced back to the revolution of 1946 the notion, put forward by

certain socialist intellectuals and activists – initially in the new PCH, and later in the

PEP –, that there existed a “nationalist bourgeoisie” consisting of the business class that

was an “objective ally” of the Haitian socialist revolution. As Matthew Smith shows,

Haitian communists found themselves in a situation in 1946, which had its origins in the

American occupation, wherein the black bourgeoisie had presented itself as the authentic

representative of the Haitian people (Smith 2009, 109). Smith points out that as noirisme

became a political force, “[c]ommunists took the position that the U.S. economic control

of Haiti was the main source of its dire poverty.” (93) Michel Hector, in his

8 “Les théoriciens du mouvement révolutionnaire et la formation sociale haïtienne.” 9 After stepping away from the Parti Progressiste de la Libération Nationale (PPLN) in 1964, a branch of that party that considered itself more faithful to Marxist-Leninist principles created the Parti des Travailleurs Haïtiens in 1966. In 1969, the PEP became one with the Parti Uni des Démocrates Haïtiens (formerly PPLN) to form the PUCH (Redsons 1970, 57). 10 “Lettre ouverte au Parti Unifié des Communistes Haïtiens.”


comprehensive study Syndicalisme et socialisme en Haïti 1932-1970, maintains that for

the PEP, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat was momentarily overlooked in

order to resolve the nation’s struggle against imperialism (Hector 1989, 110). Lastly,

support of the Haitian bourgeoisie was also based on the fact that some were actively

opposed to the government in place – whether it was Estimé, Magloire, or François

Duvalier’s regime, and were fighting for to establish a democratic system in Haiti. In

contrast, Montas argued, first with the CHES and later in works he penned alone, that

Haiti’s economy was defined by a combination of imperialism, merchant capitalism, and

feudalism – tinged with an element of “the color question,” and that this entire system

needed to be overthrown. He criticized political strategies aimed at simply replacing

“those who temporarily hold the power,” rather than of explicitly advocating for the

transformation of the laws and policies that produce exploitation in the countryside and in

the cities (Luc 1972, 98).

Six months later, in June 1970, the CHES printed “Our Socialist Revolution,”11

their own manifesto and program for socialism in Haiti. This text, a continuation of their

indictment of the PUCH, was the CHES’ contribution to a transnational conversation

about the development of a socialist revolution in Haiti. They proposed the socialization

of profits from exportations, the abolition of large proprieties loaned out to peasants

(métayage), the abolition of peasants’ debt, and the establishment of an agrarian economy

based on small privately owned plantations and larger collectively owned ones. Both

essays made use of vivid images to illustrate the Haitian agrarian workers’ political

isolation. “Our Socialist Revolution” was the last publication of the CHES, which

according to Moïse did not live up to its promise. He cites Montas’ health problems as a 11 “Notre Révolution Socialiste.”


challenge that made it difficult to meet with regularity, given that he was in and out of the

hospital. Not long after the second publication, the group disbanded. Though its activities

were short-lived, the CHES’ contributions were sufficient to sustain a brief but important

debate within Haiti’s political Left and to contribute to a growing momentum and sense

of urgency around the need for scholarship and a sustained and coordinated conversation,

both within the country and outside its borders, about the future of Haitian society.

Yves Montas and Nouvelle Optique

In an essay on the contribution of Haitians to Canadian culture, Frantz Voltaire

and Stanley Péan recall that from May 6th to 9th 1970, Montreal hosted the second

international symposium on Haiti. Organized by the University of Montreal’s department

of anthropology and by the Center for Haitian Studies, the symposium’s theme was

“Culture and Development.” The moment was ripe for an institutionalization of the

networks created within the community of Haitian intellectuals and artists in Montreal

committed to producing knowledge about Haiti. Less than a year after the symposium, in

January 1971, Nouvelle Optique: Recherches haïtiennes et caraibéennes (NO) was born.

The name referred back to that of Optique, the journal of the French cultural organization

Institut français in Haiti. Founded by the Haitian intellectuals Hérard Jadotte, Colette

Pasquis and Jean-Richard Laforest, NO had in fact been two years in the making and

sought to combine history, social sciences, and literature under one unified, published

platform (Jadotte et al. 1971, 3). Some of its most well known contributors were the

political scientist André Corten, the poet Georges Castera, the novelist Emile Ollivier, the

historian Suzy Castor, and the economist Gérard Pierre-Charles. The journal’s nine

issues, produced between 1970 and 1973, bear the marks of a diasporic intelligentsia –


located throughout the Americas but primarily in Quebec – confronting what would be

the last year of François Duvalier’s life, and the first years of the young Jean-Claude

Duvalier’s regime. A community was created around the journal, and its concerns

progressively moved towards those of socialist thinkers such as Montas, who was a

contributor early on.

Despite his recurrent health problems and the dissolution of the CHES, Montas

contributed four articles to NO between 1971 and 1972. His first piece was an essay

entitled “Perceptual and Logical Knowledge in Haitian Political Struggles” (1971).12 He

argued that Haitian socialists had misinterpreted the country’s political and economic

structures of domination and inequality because they had only observed apparent causes:

on the surface, racial inequality and discrimination seemed to define Haitian society and a

feudal system inherited from colonialism and the plantation economy seemed to

characterized its economy. For some, this feudal system required a transition towards a

capitalist economy. In “On the Diffusion of Marxism”13 (1972b), he revisited and

developed the arguments he had presented in the “Open Letter to the PUCH” about the

national bourgeoisie, imperialism, and movements strictly aimed at displacing those in

power. Amongst the contributors of NO, Montas was the most militant; the only writer

explicitly committed to a socialist revolution in Haiti. The editors of NO described him

briefly in an endnote to his first article as a Marxist activist engaged in Haiti’s

revolutionary struggle. They also made sure to distance themselves from him,

emphasizing that they did not share all of his conclusions. The endnote lastly concedes

that the editors hope Montas’ analysis will be “a starting point for a radical reevaluation

12 “Connaissance sensible et connaissance rationnelle dans les luttes politiques haïtiennes.” The title will be shortened to “Perceptual Knowledge” in the rest of this essay. 13 “Sur la diffusion du marxisme.”


of the analyses of Haitian social formation” (Luc 1971, 30). Though they took these pains

to distance themselves somewhat from him initially, the extent to which NO’s objectives

aligned with those of Montas progressed throughout the years varied. There was

however, from the beginning, a significant overlap.

Montas’ attempt to diagnose Haitian society more accurately was very much in

line with NO’s project. Going back to the CHES, the collective had written in their

preamble to the “Open Letter to the PUCH,” in 1970: “The necessity of the task of

clarification and of a large debate around the problems of the Haitian revolutionary

movement imposes itself today with a particular acuteness.” (CHES 1970, 5) The call for

a “large debate” prefigured that which NO would sound just a year later. In their very

first issue, the editors used similar terms when they imagined the journal as a medium

that would “open up a kind of wide debate around the challenges of a possible social,

economic, and cultural national restructuration.” (Jadotte et al. 1971, 5)

When they described Montas’ first NO essay in their preface to that issue, the

editors pointed out his contribution was “directly focused on acquiring knowledge about

or decoding the Haitian political reality.” (Jadotte 1971a, 5) The project these

intellectuals carried was one of social engineering, as evidenced by the language of

structuring, acquisition and decoding. The stakes of NO’s debates were high and the

writers’ deep investment in Haiti’s becoming was evident. In their fourth issue, they

described their task using starker and more evocative terms still, as “[their] quest for the

reality of Haitian life.”14 (Jadotte 1971a, 4) This “reality” referred at once (in contrast) to

the obfuscation of Duvalier’s noiriste regime, and to the plight of Haitian agrarian

workers who were invisibilized in Haitian politics. 14 “notre quête du réel haïtien” – original emphasis.


The editors of NO were particularly concerned with the exclusion of rural Haiti

within most state institutions and in academic discourse. Writing about structural

inequality and about Haiti’s inability to produce a discourse about itself, the editors

explained: “The national insularity is also a consequence of an economically and socially

oppressive system that never allowed for the continuous meeting of expressions.”

(Jadotte et al. 1971, 3) They interpreted Haiti’s isolation as being produced from within,

by internal structures of inequality that limited the depth, the breadth, and ultimately the

reach of its discursive formations. Although it mostly lent its platform to the men of the

Haitian elite in exile (besides a few notable exceptions), NO did create a space for “the

continuous meeting of expressions.” Whether or not they were closer to Haitian life, the

quest had certainly brought them closer to each other. In their sixth issue, the editors of

NO reported on a series of meetings with their readers they held between May 26th and

June 20th, 1972 in Montreal, Quebec City, and New York City. These meetings gave a

tangible quality to the diasporic Haitian community they had created around the journal

and to the resistance the writers and readers embodied. They also allowed readers to

provide constructive criticism and feedback, in hopes of building collectively on what the

journal had already accomplished. While they had written about their first issue that it

was “a portrait of our insufficiencies and of our isolation,” (7) these gatherings, held a

year and a half after that first experiment, revealed what possibilities existed for

overcoming isolation in the Haitian diaspora.

It was also in that sixth issue that NO’s editorial position began to reflect

explicitly the growing importance that analyses of class exploitation played in Haitian

political and social thought at the time. The editors of NO declared unequivocally: “N.O.


seeks to be an instrument of ideological and political struggle. Struggle against the

bourgeois ideology that dominates in Haiti, and against the petit-bourgeois ‘ideology’

that it rests upon.” (Jadotte 1972, ii) The situation of Haitians in exile allowed

intellectuals and scholars to produce more socialist analyses than had ever been possible

in Haiti, given the Haitian state’s constant repression of communism and the US

government’s strict surveillance, both of which went back to the beginnings of Marxist

organizing in Haiti in the 1930s. Under Duvalier, Haiti’s “national insularity” was

aggravated by the censorship and the repression of communist ideas and of all forms of

dissent, but also by the isolation of intellectuals in exile. At the same time, the diaspora

created a community around this isolation and engaged, more than ever, with Marxist

analyses.

Both the intellectual community and the Marxist critique continued to progress

beyond the ninth and final issue of NO, as Hérard Jadotte went on to create a publishing

house that bore the same name as the journal. Les Éditions Nouvelle Optique would be

the first publishing house founded for and by the Haitian diaspora (Manigat 338). In

1976, Nouvelle Optique would publish a collection of Montas’ essays under the title

Economic Structures and National Popular Struggle in Haiti.15 Yves Montas was part of

a movement that, at the end of François Duvalier’s regime, sought to address structural

inequality through knowledge production. The essays of this generation were explicitly

constructed as forms of resistance, as a sublimation of isolation, and a grappling with the

disenfranchisement of Haitian workers. NO was not the only instrument for this

sublimation, but it certainly was foundational for Montas and many other intellectuals

exploring the new limits of revolutionary thought. 15 Structures économiques et lutte nationale populaire en Haïti.


End of Life

Montas only published two final articles after NO ceased its activities as a journal.

The first was in 1974, a piece on the Haitian surrealist poet Magloire Saint-Aude; and the

second, written the following year, was a review of L’Espace haïtien, a study by Haitian

geographer and professor at the University of Montreal, Georges Anglade. Around 1978,

two years after the publication of his collection of essays, Montas’ illness became

increasingly difficult to manage and the economist and essayist left his career with the

provincial government in Quebec City and moved permanently to Montreal. He died

alone in his apartment in January of 1983. When his friends eventually discovered his

body, the coroner declared that Montas had been dead for two months. Claude Moïse was

then editor-in-chief of another Haitian journal based in Montreal, Collectif paroles.

Along with Dany Laferrière and Antoine Dodard, he wrote a tribute in the journal to say

goodbye to his friend. Laferrière’s piece was entitled “My Uncertain Residences,”16 in

honor of an unpublished novel Montas had been working on. A portrait of a lucid,

eccentric man emerges from these testimonies. A great lover of cinema (he borrowed his

pseudonym from the cinematographer Jean-Luc Godard), literature, and art, he worked

tirelessly and encouraged his friends to do the same.17 Moïse writes of his friend that their

relationship was complex and tumultuous. In his piece “Salut, Yves…,” he explains:

I have so much to say about Yves: exacting, tyrannical, worried, impatient, anguished, obsessed; wholly engaged in existence, detesting the endless discussions of Haitians, the “banks” as he called them, but adoring connections and loud meetings. Yves was viscerally polemical. His mind needed a target to function. (29)

16 “Mes demeures incertaines.” 17 “Crazy about cinema. Crazy about Goddard. His nickname, Jean Luc, he owes it to Goddard. ” (Laferrière 30)


The oppositional nature of his thought is evident in all of Montas’ writings, but this taste

for disruption was balanced by his desire to create alliances and to build a revolutionary

socialist movement. His own isolation is refracted in his analyses of Haiti’s economy. He

at times led an isolated life, but was only ever consumed, in his writings, by the political

isolation of Haitian urban and especially rural workers. His handful of essays were part of

a critical moment in the formation of the Haitian diaspora’s identity, but more generally

for the Haitan Left, which had been struggling to redefine itself since 1946. Through his

treatment of isolation appear the major stakes of the period and a compelling

conceptualization of power in Haiti’s landscape, economy and politics.

The Haitian Pariah

Montas’ use of the imagery of isolation to examine power relations in Haiti

extends to questions of knowledge production examined previously, as well as to

epistemological concerns. In “Perceptual Knowledge,” Montas advocates for a scientific

method that looks at causes and effects, searching beyond apparent causes and thus

beyond the apparent isolation of agricultural workers. “Perceptual Knowledge” is entirely

devoted to methodology and to questions of epistemology. From the beginning, in the

very first footnote, Montas acknowledges his essay’s debt, in terms of theory, to Mao Tse

Tung, but also to Louis Althusser and to Charles Bettelheim, though these are not the

only authors he cites. There is a long quote from Mao’s “On Practice” that strikingly

parallels Montas’ concern about the Haitian Left’s diagnosis of Haiti’s economy, and it is

found in another footnote:

To repeat, logical knowledge differs from perceptual knowledge in that perceptual knowledge pertains to the separate aspects, the phenomena and the external relations of things, whereas logical knowledge takes a big stride forward to reach the totality, the essence and the internal relations of things and


discloses the inner contradictions in the surrounding world. Therefore, logical knowledge is capable of grasping the development of the surrounding world in its totality, in the internal relations of all its aspects. (33)18

Montas posits here, as he did with the CHES, that the class struggle must be fought in the

realm of knowledge production, that the Haitian socialist revolution must first be a

conceptual one. It is important to note that in Montas’ French edition of Mao’s essay, the

word used instead of “separated” is “isolés:” isolated. Logical knowledge about separated

or isolated aspects consists of perceiving the relationships between economies and

subjects who operate in spaces cut off from one another and hold different functions

within society, and yet depend on one another. Montas’ work attempts to go beyond the

alienating miscomprehension the structures of Haiti’s economy and of global capitalism

create. The “isolated aspects” here are also the isolated agrarian workers, and their

isolation must be “grasped in its totality.”

Despite his commitment to understanding this isolation, Montas focused, in what

seems at first to be a paradoxical gesture, on the agrarian workers’ connections to the

bourgeoisie. In fact, he only used the word “isolation” in his essays a few times.

Nevertheless, the notion was central to his analysis. In “Contribution to the Study of

Relations of Production,” an essay he had already written in 1962, Montas quotes a

passage from The Development of Capitalism in Russia in which Lenin maintains that the

exploitation of “small producers” stems from their “state of isolation and of

decomposition” (1976b, 19). The following analysis shows that for Montas, exploitation,

isolation and decomposition are mutually constitutive. Montas’ work demonstrates that

political isolation rests on multiple structures of inequality that, in constituting isolation,

create various forms of contact. Montas and the CHES bemoaned, in the “Open Letter to 18 Translation: Schram edition (Mao 2004, 605).


the PUCH,” the fate of the peasant, who is at once “isolated on his plot of land,” and

“linked to and dominated by the global market” (18). The laborer’s political and

economic alienation stems from economic and political ties to the Haitian bourgeoisie,

which in turn connect her to the global market, primarily within a logic of exploitation.

The legal and social vulnerability of Haiti’s working class is born from that apparent

contradiction. For the Haitian laborer, “isolation” is the result of radical disempowerment

and geographic segregation. The bourgeoisie maintains segregation between the city and

the countryside to make possible the exploitation of agrarian workers. The various

metaphors he employed reveal these underlying aspects of Montas’ conceptualization of

isolation. Through metaphors like the octopus, the poto mitan – a term borrowed from

vodou –, the parasite and the machine, as well as other discursive strategies such as

similes, intertextuality, and historical contextualization, Montas provides the groundwork

for the conceptual revolution he called for.

Isolation Within Global Capitalism Montas was one of the first intellectuals writing on the Caribbean to attempt to

understand economic isolation in geographic terms. In “The Production of Spatial

Configurations: A Caribbean Case,” a review of three works that explored the ways in

which space is appropriated in Caribbean societies, Michel-Rolph Trouillot

contextualizes the import of Christian Girault’s 1982 study of the coffee industry in Haiti,

entitled Le commerce du café en Haïti: habitants, spéculateurs et exportateurs. In his

review, Trouillot references Montas in passing, noting that “Girault’s tracking of the crop

along those channels, from the peasant gardens to the export houses, richly documents

mechanisms of exploitation that had been only sketched in previous writings (e.g. Luc


1976).” (220) Trouillot references Montas (Jean Luc)’s collection of essays, Economic

Structures and National Popular Struggle in Haiti. Though they were indeed but

sketches, Montas’ essays were innovative and laid the foundation for a geography of

isolation in Haiti.

Montas detailed in many of his works the spatial dimension of peasants’

exploitation, both nationally and transnationally. More specifically, he mapped out the

delineations between different isolated spaces that marked a heavily segregated society.

These topographical divisions were defined and created by economic and political

disenfranchisement. Montas’ analysis identified three boundaries that mirrored structural

inequality in Haiti: the countryside, the cities, and the ports. In their letter to the PUCH,

the CHES writes: “Feudalism’s place of strength is not our cities, but rather these ports

that are open to outside commerce, where imperialism has set up camp under the guise of

a merchant economy.” (49) Montas maps the circulation of goods within Haiti and

identifies the port as the space where global trade occurs, making it a critical site in the

alienation of Haitian agrarian workers. In many essays, but especially the “Open Letter to

the PUCH,” Montas writes that the bourgeoisie has “set up camp” in the ports (“campée

dans nos ports”). The verb “to set up camp” situates contemporary imperialism squarely

in line with the legacies of colonialism and the US Marines’ occupation of Haiti between

1915 and 1934. Montas’ goal is not only to call attention to the businessmen who trade

with foreign markets and who benefit from these transactions, but also to denaturalize

their presence by using a term that calls attention to the process of setting camp. Lastly,

the camp is by definition temporary, which opens the door to the possibility of revolution,

while the military origins of the word also invite a call to arms.


Montas also reflected the centrality of the port within Haitian capitalism by

choosing primarily marine metaphors. In his earliest essay, “Contribution to the Study of

Relations of Production,” Montas describes the geographic, economic and political

relationship between center and periphery, between the ports and the countryside by

using the image of an octopus. The economist presents this marine metaphor as a form of

experimentation:

Let us use another image: merchant-capitalism is an octopus affixed to the body of Haitian society. The intermediary-speculators are the tentacles that pump the free labor of the peasant to bring it to the center, toward the privileged minority of capitalist-exporters. Naturally, along the way, the tentacles feed themselves as well. (23)

The octopus is a common metaphor for capitalism. A prime example is the 1901

historical novel The Octopus: A Story of California by Frank Norris that offers a portrait

of the development of California’s rural economy (Henderson 124). The metaphor

highlights the concentration of capital, and in the context of Haiti, the relationship

between this concentration of capital and imperialism. There is a power dynamic between

center and periphery, which here is clearly outlined as opposing the countryside to the

ports, the ports of course being in the center. The divided tentacles signal the political

isolation of agricultural workers. The “pumping,” which calls to mind the individual

circular suckers, reveals the interdependency of power, exploitation and isolation. Not

only does the metaphor of the octopus schematize the spatial organization of Haiti’s

economy, it also prefigures a categorization of three different classes within Haitian

society, with their respective roles: peasant, intermediary, exporter. The passage is also

significant because Montas calls attention to his process, to his use of images as a

discursive strategy.


The octopus participates in the marine language that Montas deploys and that

begins with the businessmen of the Bord-de-Mer, meaning “of the seaside.” The term

refers particularly to the coast of Port-au-Prince. In a passage from the “Open Letter to

the PUCH,” Montas and the CHES maintain that imperialism is as comfortable as a fish

in water within Haitian society and that it should not be conceived of as a strictly foreign

intrusion. They write, underscoring for their readers the spatial paradox of economic

exploitation within global capitalism, in the context of ostensibly sovereign nations:

Imperialism is not a far-away enemy housed in Washington. We rub shoulders with it in our streets; it is so familiar that it has ended up being confused with some of our landscapes. Imperialism is comfortable amongst us, like a fish in water: it is the businessmen of the Bord-de-Mer. Imperialism is present in our daily lives, well before the ‘Marines’ and the green berets that only appear in critical moments. There are these ‘constants’ of imperialism that remain on our continent when the occupier has left after resolving our crises. (49-50)

This passage is Montas’ strongest indictment of the Haitian exporters. The CHES

collapse the distance that proponents of a “nationalist capitalism” attempt to create

between the Haitian bourgeoisie and an American imperialism made to seem “far-away.”

They explicitly undo the overstating of the spatial distance, of the ocean between Haiti

and the U.S. interests that mold its economy and its government. They resist the notion

that imperialism is strictly a foreign aggressor, a force of “occupation,” and assert instead

that it is part of Haiti’s ecosystem, in the form of the Haitian business class, and must be

apprehended as such. Montas and the CHES use the term Bord-de-Mer to designate the

comprador bourgeoisie, but Bord-de-Mer is also the name of a town in the north of Haiti.

The reference is noteworthy because it is in fact in the same area as the town of Bord-de-

Mer that Christopher Columbus landed in Haiti, in 1492. The term is layered with


multiple histories of violence, exploitation, and resistance, from colonization to

occupation and imperialism.

The contact, the rubbing of shoulders that political isolation requires to produce

structural inequality is found in the etymology of the word isolation, which reveals that

the word is itself a marine metaphor. According to the dictionary Trésor de la langue

française (TLF), the French verb “isoler” was coined in the 17th century to mean “to make

something take the shape of an island.” In turn, what defines the island is not only the

absence of contact with another body of land; more important still is that that the

enclosure of the sea generate a specific climate. The TLF notes: “The term island applies

to a tract of land of very variable size. The area must be small enough so that the climate

is entirely subjected to marine influence.” The definition of “island” encompasses not

only distance and lack of contact, but also, and perhaps more importantly, power and

subjection. The word island, and thus isolation, signifies not only distance from other

bodies of land, but a vulnerability to that which the tract of land is in contact with, water.

One cannot fully grasp the meaning of isolation unless one takes into consideration that it

implies a vulnerability brought on by contact: it is different in this way from (though it

can be combined with) the state of being alone, loneliness, or solitude. The metaphor of

isolation is a metaphor for vulnerability and submission.

The preponderance of the marine in Montas’ work also relates to vodou. In fact in

vodou, as in the French origin of the word island, the sea does not isolate in the sense of

separating. The sea simultaneously separates and links heaven and earth. Similarly,

Montas brings together two spaces that are physically isolated from each other, but that

have been and continue to be the site of exchanges that profoundly restructured the


spaces in question, making them inextricably and permanently linked. What is more, the

CHES used a metaphor borrowed from vodou in “Our Socialist Revolution.” They

describe the import-export business class as a poto mitan. The poto mitan symbolizes the

center of the universe and is a pole placed in the center of the hounfò, the vodou temple,

to channel spirits, the loas. The ritual dancing revolves around this center. For Montas

and the CHES, “The poto mitan of [Haitian] society is this merchant bourgeoisie that has

set up camp in our ports.” (103) As a socio-economic metaphor, the poto mitan is a

signifier for power within the political economy of Haiti; and in the context of the Haitian

landscape, it serves as a spatial metaphor that describes the path taken by raw materials

on their way to metropoles abroad.

The gender questions at stake in this metaphor also come to the fore, given that

women play a significant role in vodou ceremonies, and especially because of the

common Haitian proverb: “Fanm se poto mitan” (“Women are the poto mitan”). This

proverb is used to communicate the role women play in Haitian society and in Haitian

families, where the mother is often the sole provider and caretaker. Montas and the CHES

have rewritten the proverb to place imperialism and the business class that enables it at

the center of not only the Haitian economy, but of Haitian society itself. The author’s

choice of metaphor highlights – inadvertently perhaps – the absence of any analysis of

gender in his work. Because of this absence, the metaphor of the poto mitan invites a

reading of the intersections of class and gender for which Montas’ work otherwise does

not make room. It calls attention to the place of women, “pillars” of Haitian society,

within the isolated class of Haitian agricultural and industrial workers, and within global

capitalism.


Political Isolation Within a Revolutionary Context

With the Haitian bourgeoisie’s ties to the global economy in mind, Montas sought

to design a political strategy that took into account Haiti’s history and that addressed its

centralized economy and its corresponding social structure of isolation head-on. Such a

political praxis would have to mean for Montas and the CHES that they would tackle the

problems raised by the fact that Marxist activists in Haiti were – much like themselves –

mostly from the petite bourgeoisie and, more importantly, did not stop serving their class

interests. The CHES saw in the American occupation a crucial moment in the political

isolation of the Haitian masses. They argued in the “Open Letter to the PUCH” that the

Haitian political elite, including the Left, was from then on cut off from the peasant

uprisings and constituted a political and intellectual movement of its own:

When the American occupation brutally silenced the demands of the masses, and when it restored the political institutions and couched the power of the bourgeoisie on solid bases, the political struggle came to be restricted to the cities and within a framework that opposed the different privileged categories and classes of our society . . . (8)

The Marines simultaneously disempowered the peasant resistance movements by killing

tens of thousands of rebels and further consolidated the concentration of power within the

elites, essentially radicalizing political disenfranchisement (Bellegarde-Smith 80). The

CHES’ argument in their open letter rejoins the claim Sidney Mintz would make in

Caribbean Transformations in 1974. Mintz contended that the Marines’ training of the

Haitian army and its relentless repression of the armed resistance to the occupation,

particularly between 1918 and 1920, during the Caco revolt, “may have ended forever the

possibility of an agrarian revolt against the central authority.” (293) Mintz adds further

that Duvalier depended on the support of a Haitian business elite that “had strong


business and personal ties with North Americans and other foreign groups.” (293)

Montas and the CHES underline the spatial dimension of this shift, maintaining that

political change after the American occupation would only emerge from within the city

and would be led by its wealthy denizens, according to their interests. Montas’ plea for

the isolation of the Haitian bourgeoisie thus stems from a historical understanding of its

role in the political isolation of the urban and rural poor in Haiti. This understanding is

informed by questions of geographic isolation and the centralization of political power

that go at least as far back as the American occupation.

Much of the importance Montas placed on class-consciousness was therefore not

directed towards Haiti’s rural and urban poor, but instead towards certain parts of the

Haitian bourgeoisie. While on the one hand he wanted to make clear the isolation of

agrarian laborers within the Haitian economy and within global capitalism, this

conceptualization served in turn to isolate factions of the Haitian bourgeoisie that some

socialists, namely in the PEP, viewed as natural allies of the revolution. A large part of

Montas’ work can be resumed by his relentless denunciation of the fact that Haitian

workers’ interests only appear to be central to socialist movements in the country. He

vehemently opposed the notion that the Haitian bourgeoisie and even the petite

bourgeoisie, composed of professionals and cadres, could be viewed as “objective allies

of the revolution.” For Montas, the entire Haitian economy rested on the exploitation of

agrarian workers. He writes in “Perceptual Knowledge:”

Our public servants, our commerce employees, our professionals, our intellectuals, where do their revenues stem from, if not from the operation of the parasitic economy of the cities, even if they are not themselves exploiters. . . . It is this analysis that allows us to place the petit-bourgeois of the cities side by side with the grands dons [major plantation owners] of the countryside, and to not make them in any case objective allies of the revolution. (13)


This was one of Montas’ most significant and most contested contributions to Haitian

political thought. Seeking to expose the connection between what Mao referred to as

seemingly “isolated aspects,” Montas argued that even those who do not depend directly

on rural and industrial labor nevertheless benefit from the value they create and are thus

implicated in this system and have a vested interest in perpetuating it.

The belief that there could be unity between a faction of the Haitian bourgeoisie

and the Haitian rural and urban poor comes from the notion of a “nationalist

bourgeoisie,” but also from the ways in which politicians and intellectuals have

instrumentalized “the color question” to create the illusion of solidarity with the Haitian

masses (Hector 1989, 59). For Montas, as for many intellectuals of the time, the color

question had limited relevance and, in the end, had largely been employed to thwart the

elaboration of a socialist movement in Haiti. Referring with the CHES in “Our Socialist

Revolution” to the counterproductive nature of race as a mobilizing category in Haiti, he

writes: “It prevents us from isolating this bourgeoisie politically. The color question,

instead, tends to create a fake and mystifying alliance between the black petit-bourgeois,

the peasants, and the proletariat.” (112-113) The “fake and mystifying alliance” is

directly related to the distinction between perceptual and logical knowledge. The political

mobilization of race when used as the primary category to understand inequality created

the appearance of solidarity, while in fact it did not serve, according to Montas, the

interests of Haitian agrarian and factory workers. It only isolated them further.

The economist’s indictment of currents such as noirisme, indigénisme and

négritude is supported in other essays by quotations from the writings of the Black

Panthers and of Frantz Fanon. In “On the Diffusion of Marxism,” he quoted an excerpt of


the 1971 French translation of The Black Panthers Speak. He cites Eldrige Cleaver’s

essay on cultural nationalism and politics: “Cultural nationalism manifests itself in many

ways, but all its manifestations are characterized by the same ignorance of contemporary

political, social and economic realities and by an excessive valorization of cultural

heritage.” (95-96) Montas did not argue for the complete evacuation of questions about

race and culture, but rather for these questions to be centered on economic exploitation.

He argued that the black bourgeoisie merely secured a space for itself within the elites,

never addressing the conditions that marginalize the working class. In “Perceptual

Knowledge,” Montas quotes Huey Newton at length, providing his own translation of an

excerpt from The Genius of Huey Newton in which the Black Panther leader states that

“to be a revolutionary nationalist, one must necessarily be a socialist.” (25) In the excerpt

Montas selected, Newton points to the Duvalier regime specifically: “Papa Doc in Haiti is

an excellent example of reactionary nationalism. He oppresses his people, but encourages

African culture.” (26) By quoting Cleaver and Newton, Montas inscribed himself in the

intellectual lineage of the Black Panthers, thus placing himself within a network of

revolutionary black thinkers that crossed national and cultural boundaries. Though he

distanced himself from the false solidarity of noirisme and of cultural nationalisms, he

opened up another space that allowed him to think through colonialism, racism, and the

marginalization of the primarily black Haitian poor.

Montas and the CHES saw in the disconnect between the Haitian political elite

and Haitian workers, and in exploitation of the “color question” a major obstacle. Though

the communists’ discourse did provide a class analysis of Haitian society, the CHES

nevertheless argued in its letter to the PUCH that the Haitian “revolutionary movement


did not graft itself on the demands of the people any more than it situated itself in any

local tradition of revolutionary thought, as was the case in Cuba with Jose Martí.” (8) The

metaphor of the graft suggests a symbiosis, surrender and a true collaboration. It defies

any “fake and mystifying alliances” and symbolizes the potential for healing through the

relinquishing of power. For Montas, the decision to isolate the bourgeoisie from a

socialist movement follows from his analysis of the isolation of the rural and urban poor

in Haiti, from the history of the American occupation, and from the instrumentalization

of cultural nationalism. Any member of the Haitian bourgeoisie who would claim to

participate in, or desire to contribute to a socialist movement would have to, for Montas

and the CHES, remove himself or herself from that class, and thus from a part of

themselves, in order to join Haitian agricultural and industrial laborers.

The Revolutionary Potential of the Peasantry

The graft is an unusual metaphor in Montas’ work given that the metaphors he used,

such as the octopus and the poto mitan, to convey political isolation and exploitation, and

the interconnections of power, space, and class, were grounded in the dichotomy of

center and periphery, with the bourgeoisie occupying the center and the working class

relegated to the periphery. Though the question of gender already implicitly destabilizes

this framework, and the image of the graft provides a solution for communist intellectuals

to begin to reverse it, Montas does not leave much room for possibilities of resistance for

the agrarian workers themselves. Since his political strategy principally consisted in

isolating the bourgeoisie, he did not explore what possibilities existed for the working

class beyond the graft. One image does however counter this disempowering narrative.

The CHES opted, in “Our Socialist Revolution,” to signify the bonds of exploitation that


tie together peasants and the haute bourgeoisie by designating the latter as parasites. They

write:

the peasant fights marocas [type of worm], the Mexican weevil, snails, worms, rats, in short, all this parasitic vermin that physically threatens his trees and his crops. He has to find a way to fight another type of parasite: the grands dons of the countryside and the businessmen of the Bord-de-Mer. (99)

The grands dons of the countryside are owners of large plantations who loan their land,

through various types of arrangements, to agrarian workers, while the businessmen of the

Bord-de-Mer, as seen previously, are responsible for import-export activities. They

represent for Montas and the CHES the two mainstays of the Haitian economy, feudal on

the one hand and capitalistic on the other. Although the metaphor is common in his work,

this passage is Montas’ most elaborate and most colorful description of what he describes

as the parasitic nature of the Haitian bourgeoisie. He may have borrowed the expression

from a vast array of sources, including Marx’s work itself, where the image refers to the

class of money lenders and rentiers. In the CHES’ elaborate comparison, the peasant is

not passive or unknowing, as is oft implied by this metaphor, given that the victim can be

unaware of his status as host. Instead, the agricultural worker is actively combating her

exploitation: the context is one of struggle. The choice of parasites – those that can be

seen with the naked eye and thus more easily eradicated – and the almost comical

enumeration render the constant battle against exploitation visible. The verb the authors

use, “lutter,” is clearly linked to “la lutte des classes,” class struggle. Furthermore, the

phrase “all this parasitic vermin” is almost a pleonasm, except that it suggests a multitude

and a category, thus prefiguring the notion of class Montas makes explicit by naming the

grands dons and the businessmen of the Bord-de-mer. The notion of a “type of parasite”

in the next sentence confirms this classificatory gesture. Lastly, the metaphor of the


parasite recalls the connection made by Lenin in The Development of Capitalism in

Russia, between isolation, decomposition, and the exploitation of agrarian workers. The

parasite is a figure of decay, but one that can be combated.

In keeping with the theorization of isolation as inextricable from a vulnerability born

from contact, the metaphor of the parasite exaggerates the physical proximity that binds

the peasant and the landowner or the businessman. In fact, the scene reverses the scale of

the octopus metaphor, with its tentacles that pumped free labor. What’s more, the reversal

functions like a microscope. When the CHES writes about “this parasitic vermin that

physically threatens,” the use of the adverb “physically” calls attention to the body, to the

material toll that capitalist exploitation takes on those who toil the land, whether they

own it or not. The metaphor materializes and illustrates the surplus value that is extracted

from their labor. “Our Socialist Revolution” is the only text in which Montas calls

attention to the worker’s body. In the same portrait of the agrarian worker, the CHES

adds, a little further, describing in detail what was already then a cliché:

We all have in mind or before our eyes this scene, the malnourished children of our countryside: diminished bodies from which the ribs stick out as if to already prefigure the skeleton of their cadavers, protuberant stomach hanging over the knees, bony knots, and the legs, emaciated and misshapen baguettes. (CHES 1976, 99)

The starving child comes to symbolize political isolation: the infantilization and the

political instrumentalization of “peasants,” the slow decay of the body, and the society of

spectacle that profits from this dehumanization. The metaphor of the baguette is the

cruelly ironic, mirroring the cynicism that such a visual economy creates. “When we

speak of the isolation of the peasantry, we are not being poetic,” wrote Christian and

Maritza Girault, using the pseudonyms Toussaint and Claire, in an article they published


in 1980 in Collectif Paroles, entitled “Thiote: a Splendid Isolation.” The CHES, instead,

were being overtly poetic in order to signal that images produced about Haiti in North

America were by no means transparent. The line between poetic and prosaic was

evidently already blurred for them. Exquisite isolation within global capitalism circulated

and was consumed as a cliché to sustain a developing humanitarian industrial complex –

a parasite no doubt harder to combat than the grands dons and the businessmen of the

Bord-de-mer.

One of the limits of the parasite metaphor is that it runs the risk, symbolically, of

naturalizing the aggressions of capitalism by placing them in the context of “nature,” as

with the fish in water. In other passages from “Our Socialist Revolution,” as well as in

other texts, however, Montas explicitly points out the legal frameworks that create and

sustain exploitation. Already in their letter to the PUCH, Montas and the CHES had

expressed this relationship without ambiguity: “The organization of Haitian society

consecrates the exploitation of the peasant class in both its forms: the legality of the large

property and free commerce.” (34) “Our Socialist Revolution” was meant for a larger

audience and the authors took the time to refute the moral grounds of this economic

system, using once again the parasite as a metaphor:

This right to live as a parasite on the work of others because one holds a title deed, this right is not a natural right, it is a right consecrated by the laws of a type of society, it is a right developed by the men of a given society, it is a right that can be abolished by men who are committed to creating a another type of social organization. (96)

The CHES relied on a contrast between the natural world and the historically contingent

nature of social class to affirm that social inequality and the capitalist system from which

it stemmed could be overcome. At the same time, they destabilized the legal and social


notion of “having the right to” by invoking “natural law.” The reference was merely

oppositional however, as Montas never affirmed the existence of such a law in relation to

the organization of capital.

Instead, Montas used the notion of a “mechanism” to describe the ways in which

he believed one should conceptualize the system as a whole and the situation of Haitian

agrarian workers within the global economy. In “Perceptual Knowledge,” he writes about

“driving belts” (9) in the Haitian economy, and in “For a National Popular Struggle

Front,”19 published in NO in 1972, he writes, describing imperialism after the American

occupation, that “the passage from colonialism to neo-colonialism implies a certain

indigenization of the machinery of foreign domination.” (127-128) The French word for

“machinery” in the original text is rouage – literally cogs or gearwheels. These

metaphors contrast strongly with the aquatic images and that of parasites or grafts, which

evoked a natural order. The mechanism, instead, highlights the socially constructed

nature of this political economy and of structural inequality. It defines capitalism in Haiti

as a system, one in which isolated parts each play a distinct role, while being interrelated

to each other. Moreover, mechanics imply physics and observable phenomena, as well as

empiricism and predictable results. Referring to the mechanization of the Haitian

economy as a metaphor creates a parallel between the alienation of the assembly line and

the epistemic alienation of capitalism and of the global market. Within such a logic, as

with the “camp” in the ports, both an intellectual and a social revolution are not only

possible, but attainable.

19 “Pour un front de lutte nationale populaire.”


Conclusion

Perhaps more strongly and more explicitly than any other writer who was not

directly involved in a political party, Montas fought for this socialist revolution in Haiti.

Neither an academic nor an organizer, his self-appointed task was that of critique. This

position on the margins allowed him to perceive that Haitian agrarian workers were only

isolated insofar as they had economic ties to the bourgeoisie and political ties to the petit-

bourgeois-led socialist parties. His reflections, and the metaphors he used to illustrate

them, remain central to thinking not only about liberation and socialism, but also to

understanding sovereignty. Not only did he participate, with the CHES and with NO, in a

revolution in knowledge production about Haiti, Montas also invited readers to join him

in a linguistic experiment, one that opened up possibilities for theorizing isolation.

Montas laid the groundwork for a Haitian revolutionary movement that went beyond

nationalism and was rooted in a tradition of black radical thought, inspired by the works

of Frantz Fanon and the Black Panthers, while engaging with contemporaries on the

ground in Haiti and with Marxist theorists such as Mao and Lenin. Above all, this

movement was couched in a historical analysis and in a conception of isolation as a

mechanism of subjugation and exploitation. Resistance emerges from Montas’ essays and

from the work of NO’s editors as a project that abolishes, as part of its praxis, the

isolation of exile. Reading and writing were both part of that diasporic praxis, as was

collaborative work. Montas contributions were not, however, able to sustain this

transnational debate, which in the end seems to have died with him. His essays remain, as

part of a moment in which Haitian intellectuals and militants strived to comprehend and


ultimately dismantle the nexus of exploitation, decomposition and isolation that agrarian

workers faced and fought against.


Bibliography

American Association of Teachers of French. 1968. “Directory of the AATF.” The French Review 41.7 (Sept): 988–1104.

Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick. 1990. Haiti: The Breached Citadel. San Francisco and

London: Westview Press. Cahn, Roger H. 1978. Review of Structures économiques et lutte nationale populaire en

Haïti, by Jean Luc. Tiers-Monde 19.75: 675. Cercle haïtien d’études socialistes (CHES). 1970. Lettre ouverte au Parti unifié des

communistes haïtiens, pamphlet. Nanterre: Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine.

______. 1976. “Notre révolution socialiste.” In Jean Luc, Structures économiques et lutte

nationale populaire en Haïti, 83–125. Montréal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique. Comité central du Parti d’entente populaire d’Haïti. 1967. Voies tactiques de la nouvelle

indépendance d’Haïti. Haiti: Éditions « Avant-garde ». Haiti Sun. 1953. “Yves Montas.” 29 November, p. 13. Hector, Michel. 1989. Syndicalisme et socialisme en Haïti 1932–1970. Port-au-Prince:

Imprimerie Henri Deschamps. Henderson, George L. 2003 [1998]. California and the Fictions of Capital. Philadelphia:

Temple University Press. “Île.” Definition A. 1. a) Rem. Trésor de la langue française informatisé. http://www.

cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/ile?. Accessed 21 May 2014. “Isoler.” Étymol. et Hist. 1. a) Trésor de la langue française informatisé. http://www.

cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/isoler?. Accessed 21 May 2014. Jadotte, Hérard. 1972. “À propos de l’orientation de Nouvelle Optique.” Nouvelle

Optique: recherches haïtiennes et caribéennes 1.6 (September): i–iv. ______. 1971a. “Éditorial.” Nouvelle Optique: recherches haïtiennes et caribéennes 1.2

(May): 3–6. ______. 1971b. “Éditorial.” Nouvelle Optique: recherches haïtiennes et caribéennes 1.4

(October–December): 3–4. Jadotte, Hérard, Colette Pasquis, and Jean-Richard Laforest. 1971. “Nouvelle Optique.”

Nouvelle optique : recherches haïtiennes et caribéennes 1.1 (January): 3–7.


Laferrière, Dany. 1983. “Mes demeures incertaines.” Collectif paroles 22 (March–April):

29–30. Luc, Jean. 1971. “Connaissance sensible et connaissance rationnelle dans les luttes

politiques haïtiennes.” Nouvelle optique : recherches haïtiennes et caribéennes 1.2 (May): 7–34.

______. 1972a. “Pour un front de lutte nationale populaire.” Nouvelle optique :

recherches haïtiennes et caribéennes 8 (October–December): 125–128. ______. 1972b. “Sur la diffusion du marxisme.” Nouvelle optique : recherches haïtiennes

et caribéennes 6–7 (April–September): 89–104. ______. 1976a. “Avant-propos.” Structures économiques et lutte nationale populaire en

Haïti, 9–13. Montréal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique. ______. 1976b. “Contribution à l’étude des rapports de production dans les campagnes

haïtiennes.” Structures économiques et lutte nationale populaire en Haïti, 15–46. Montréal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique.

Manigat, Max. 1980. “Le livre haïtien en diaspora.” Études littéraires 13.2: 335–354. Mao Tse Tung. 2004. “On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice,

Between Knowing and Doing.” Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912–1949, ed. Stuart R. Schram, Vol. 6. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe.

Mintz, Sidney. 2009 [1974]. Caribbean Transformations. New Brunswick NJ: Adeline. Moïse, Claude. 1972. “Les théoriciens du mouvement révolutionnaire et la formation

sociale haïtienne.” Nouvelle optique : recherches haïtiennes et caribéennes 5 (January–March): 119–142.

______. 1983. “Salut, Yves . . . .” Collectif paroles 22 (March–April): 28–29. ______. 2013. Personal interview. 24 December. Montas, Yves. 1975. “À propos de L’Espace haïtien. Lettre d’Yves Montas à Georges

Anglade.” Présence haïtienne 3 (October): 37–40. Montas Jean, Marie-Lucie. 2014. Personal interview. 9 February. Nicholls, David. 1996. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National

Independence in Haiti. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Péan, Stanley, and Frantz Voltaire. 2013. “Contribution des artistes haïtiens dans le


secteur culturel canadien.” Collectif images 2004, 9 December <http://www. collectif2004images.org/ Contribution-des-artistes-haitiens-dans-le-secteur-culturel-canadien_a100.html>.

Redsons, Victor. 1970. Genèse des rapports sociaux en Haïti, 1492–1970. Suivi de

Problèmes du mouvement communiste haïtien, 1959–1970. Paris: N. Béthune. Smith, Matthew. 2009. Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political

Change, 1934–57. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Press. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/9780807894156_smith

Trouillot, Michel. 1983. “The Production of Spatial Configurations: A Caribbean Case.”

Review of Atlas critique d’Haïti and Espace et liberté en Haïti by Georges Anglade; Hispaniola by G. Anglade, R. E. Yunén and D. Audette, and Le commerce du café en Haïti : habitants, spéculateurs et exportateurs by Christian A. Girault. New West Indian Guide 57.3–4: 215–229.

The Mechanisms of Isolation: The Life and Thought of Yves Montas

Documents

Transcript of The Mechanisms of Isolation: The Life and Thought of Yves Montas