A FEW weeks after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, in February, 1986, the statue of Christopher Columbus presiding over the harbor of Port-au-Prince was seized and thrown into the sea by persons unknown, who left fastened on the empty pedestal a sheet of paper with a simple scrawled message: “Pa de blans en Hayti!“

In Creole, the word blans means foreigner as well as white: Haitians applying the slogan “No foreigners in Haiti!” to Christopher Columbus is a little comedy, and one that begins to convey sense of the byzantine intertwinings of Haitian history, culture, and ideology; for when Columbus landed, in 1492, on the north coast of the island of Hispaniola (the western third of which is now called Haiti), his arrival predated that of the first black by almost a quarter century. It was only after the Spanish had virtually exterminated some half-million native Arawak Indians through forced labor, unfamiliar disease, and indiscriminate brutality that they imported their first African slaves — an expedient authorized by the Spanish Crown pa…

Read the full text of this article in Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War.