Unmaking the Tricolore: Catherine Flon, Material Testimony and Occluded Narratives of Female-Led Resistance in Haiti and the Haitian Dyaspora

Abstract

The Haitian Revolution was the most radical antislavery and anticolonial struggle of the modern Atlantic World and the only successful slave revolution. Yet the dominant, white-authored colonial archive, which privileges written texts over forms of non-literary expression that flourished in the archive of slavery, conspicuously occludes the historical agents at its locus. While Michel-Rolph Trouillot set a precedent for rehabilitating these histories, the voices of the women that were so central to this historical moment remain concealed, peripheral and ultimately ignored. Using a creative interdisciplinary methodology, this article interrogates how unarticulated narratives of Haiti’s revolutionary women might be reassembled from disparate sources, looking closely at the mythologised figure of Catherine Flon, who purportedly sewed together the first Haitian flag at the Congress of Arcahaie on 18 May 1803. It also examines how artists and community groups in Haiti and across the Haitian dyaspora aim to preserve such figures for posterity.