Politics & Power Quote by Edwidge Danticat

Napoleon doesn’t just lose Haiti in Edwidge Danticat’s telling; he loses the continent. The line has the brisk momentum of a corrective, the kind you deliver when you’re tired of watching the same history get retold with the wrong protagonists. By naming “slaves and free people” in the same breath, she refuses the flattening shorthand that turns the Haitian Revolution into either a footnote or a morality play. It was a coalition, a political experiment under fire, and it forced an empire to hemorrhage.

The intent is revisionary without being academic. Danticat links two events Americans are taught to hold separately: Haiti’s successful revolt against France and the Louisiana Purchase. In mainstream U.S. mythology, the Purchase reads like Jeffersonian destiny at bargain price. Danticat’s framing makes it sound more like an imperial garage sale prompted by defeat. “Depleted his forces” is doing quiet but decisive work: it’s the practical, unromantic mechanism that turns revolutionary courage into geopolitical consequence.

Subtextually, she’s calling out how power narrates itself. If Haiti’s revolution altered the map, then Haiti isn’t peripheral; it is causal. And if the U.S. expansion was enabled by Black liberation abroad, that unsettles the comforting story of American growth as purely visionary. The understated phrasing, “for very little money,” lands like a barb: the cheapness isn’t just fiscal, it’s moral, hinting at how little acknowledgment was paid to the people whose struggle made that “deal” possible.