Kidnapped Narratives: Mobility without Autonomy and the Nation/Novel Analogy

What does it augur when kidnappings are part of the primal scene of postcolonial nation building and self-representation? In this chapter, I explore the emblematic nature of kidnapping in the African diasporan colonial encounter with the conditions of textual and print culture. As a point of departure, let us consider an episode from the new millennium in which this history of kidnapped narratives was evoked. The 2004 Bicentennial in Haiti was supposed to have inaugurated a year of celebration and commemoration of the 1804 Independence and its global legacies of African diasporan self-emancipation and nineteenth century decolonization. Instead, in the morning of February 29, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was reported to have resigned, and to have left the country under American military escort for an unknown destination. By March 1, the plane carrying Aristide and his American-born wife Mildred had landed in the former French colony of the Central African Republic. “I was forced to leave,” the Haitian leader said in a phone call to associates in the US (McLaughlin, 2004). In an address to the Haitian people broadcast on Telehaiti in Haiti, Aristide formulated a sort of descriptive maxim: his departure had been “a modern way to have a modern kidnapping” (Slevin and Wilson, 2004). Later he nuanced the description further as “a geo-political kidnapping, terrorism disguised as diplomacy” (Aristide, 2004). (A common witticism promptly emerged to describe the confluence of kidnapping and coup: a “coupnapping.”) Aristide then adapted to his own plight the memorable line pronounced by the famous Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture on the occasion of the latter’s kidnapping by the French government in June 1802. Toussaint had said, in Gonaives where he was embarked for his exile and imprisonment in France, “In overthrowing