THE CLR JAMES JOURNAL 20:1–2, Fall 2014 115–138 doi: 10.5840/clrjames201492214 © THE CLR JAMES JOURNAL . ISSN 2167-4256 The Mechanisms of Isolation: The Life and Thought of Yves Montas Nathalie Batraville “ T he landless peasant is a pariah,” wrote Yves Montas in 1962, in an es- say 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 con- cern 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’s 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 intellectu- als. 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’s pamphlets and essays sheds light on the articulation and devel- opment 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 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 litera- ture. Montas’s conceptualization of, on the one hand, the political isolation CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 20, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2014 116 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 po- litical 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’s view, Haitian communists faced an im- passe since the revolution of 1946 and could no longer freely critique the Haitian bourgeoisie. His critique of socialist parties in Haiti past and pres- ent 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 conjec - ture of the 1960s and to transform Haitian society. This essay begins with an account of Yves Montas’s 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 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” of his collection of essays, for “a certain period of time,” he adhered to the ideology of noirisme (1976a, 11). This ideology interpreted the stark inequality in Haiti as stemming from structures of ex- ploitation 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, econom - ic, 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 or - der to be abolished, a social, cultural, and political affirmation of Haiti’s African heritage (2009, 25). It is unclear whether Montas’s 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 administra - tion, resolutely anti-communist from its very beginning, went so far as to reduce the amount of scholarships awarded for studying in France because 117 dŚe DecŚaŶisms oĨ IsolaƟoŶ: dŚe >iĨe aŶd dŚoƵŐŚƚ oĨ zǀes DoŶƚas he believed French communists were corrupting the minds of Haitian stu- dents pursuing their studies abroad (Smith 2009, 156). Montas nevertheless attended the prestigious École nationale d’administration, in Paris, study - ing Public 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 to - wards 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 contradic - tory 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 cli - mate 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 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 intellectu- als 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 re - garding 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. CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 20, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2014 118 Writing in Exile Montas’s self-imposed exile from Haiti resulted from a multiplicity of fac- tors. 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 presi- dential 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’s 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 Mon- treal, 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 creat - ing 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 popu- lated, 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 free- dom of expression, especially when it came to communist ideas. Whether in Haiti or New York, Montas found groups of committed ex - hiled 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 intel- lectuals, 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 dis- cussion 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 119 dŚe DecŚaŶisms oĨ IsolaƟoŶ: dŚe >iĨe aŶd dŚoƵŐŚƚ oĨ zǀes DoŶƚas a new Socialist party born in 1966: the Parti des Travailleurs Haïtiens. Three years later, the fusion of two 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 col - lectively 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 oc- cupation, 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 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 Hai- tian 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 imperi - alism, merchant capitalism, and feudalism—tinged with an element of “the color question,” and that this entire system needed to be overthrown. He crit- icized 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 Revolu- tion,” 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 CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 20, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2014 120 CHES, which according to Moïse did not live up to its promise. He cites Montas’s health problems as a challenge that made it difficult to meet with regularity, given that he was in and out of the hospital. Not long after the second essay, the group disbanded. Though its activities were short-lived, the CHES’ contributions were sufficient to sustain a brief but important de - bate 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 with- in 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 intel- lectuals 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 his- torian 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 cre - ated 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 Politi- cal Struggles” (1971). 12 He argued that Haitian socialists had misinterpreted the country’s political and economic structures of domination and inequal- ity 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 121 dŚe DecŚaŶisms oĨ IsolaƟoŶ: dŚe >iĨe aŶd dŚoƵŐŚƚ oĨ zǀes DoŶƚas 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 move - ments 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 revo - lutionary 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’s analysis will be “a starting point for a radical reevaluation 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’s 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 prob - lems of the Haitian revolutionary movement imposes itself today with a particular acuteness” (CHES 1970, 5). The call for a “large debate” prefig - ured 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 pos- sible social, economic, and cultural national restructuration” (Jadotte et al. 1971, 5). When they described Montas’s first NO essay in their preface to that issue, the editors pointed out his contribution was “directly focused on ac- quiring knowledge about or decoding the Haitian political reality” (Jadotte, 1971a, 5). The project these intellectuals carried was one of social engineer - ing, 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”(Jadotte 1971a, 4). 14 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. 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 dis- course about itself, the editors explained: “The national insularity is also a consequence of an economically and socially oppressive system that never CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 20, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2014 122 allowed for the continuous meeting of expressions” (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 tangi- ble 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 insuf - ficiencies and of our isolation” (7), these gatherings, held a year and a half after that first experiment, revealed what possibilities existed for overcom - ing isolation in the Haitian diaspora. It was also in that sixth issue that NO ’s editorial position began to re- flect 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 schol- ars to produce more socialist analyses than had ever been possible in Haiti, given the Haitian state’s constant repression of communism and the US gov - ernment’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 commu- nist 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 1980, 338). In 1976, Nouvelle Op- tique would publish a collection of Montas’s 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 gen- eration were explicitly constructed as forms of resistance, as a sublimation 123 dŚe DecŚaŶisms oĨ IsolaƟoŶ: dŚe >iĨe aŶd dŚoƵŐŚƚ oĨ zǀes DoŶƚas of isolation, and a grappling with the disenfranchisement of Haitian work- ers. 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. 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 re - view 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’s 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 Mon- treal. 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 Hai- tian 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), lit- erature, 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, im- patient, 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) The oppositional nature of his thought is evident in all of Montas’s 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 re- fracted 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. CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 20, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2014 124 The Haitian Pariah Montas’s 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 agricul- tural workers. “Perceptual Knowledge” is entirely devoted to methodology and to questions of epistemology. From the beginning, in the very first foot - note, 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’s 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 sur- rounding 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 revo- lution must first be a conceptual one. It is important to note that in Montas’s 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’s 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 fo- cused, 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 “iso- lation” 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 Develop- ment of Capitalism in Russia in which Lenin maintains that the exploitation of “small producers” stems from their “state of isolation and of decomposi- tion” (1976b, 19). The following analysis shows that for Montas, exploitation, isolation and decomposition are mutually constitutive. Montas’s work 125 dŚe DecŚaŶisms oĨ IsolaƟoŶ: dŚe >iĨe aŶd dŚoƵŐŚƚ oĨ zǀes DoŶƚas demonstrates that political isolation rests on multiple structures of inequal- ity that, in constituting isolation, create various forms of contact. Montas and the CHES bemoaned, in the “Open Letter to 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” (CHES 1970, 18). The laborer’s political and economic alienation stems from economic and political ties to the Hai- tian 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 la- borer, “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’s 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 histori- cal 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 Pro - duction of Spatial Configurations: A Caribbean Case,” a review of three works that explored the ways in which space is appropriated in Caribbean societ- ies, 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)” (Trouillot 1983, 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’s 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 peas- ants’ 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’s analy- sis 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 CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 20, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2014 126 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 agrar- ian 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 imperial- ism squarely in line with the legacies of colonialism and the US Marines’ occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934. Montas’s goal is not only to call attention to the businessmen who trade with foreign markets and who ben - efit 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 revolu - tion, 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 econo- mist presents this marine metaphor as a form of experimentation: Let us use another image: merchant-capitalism is an octopus affixed onto 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. (Luc 1976b, 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 of- fers a portrait of the development of California’s rural economy (Henderson 2003, 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 iso- lation. 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 127 dŚe DecŚaŶisms oĨ IsolaƟoŶ: dŚe >iĨe aŶd dŚoƵŐŚƚ oĨ zǀes DoŶƚas seaside.” The term refers particularly to the coast of Port-au-Prince. In a pas- sage 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 ex- ploitation 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 be - ing 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. (CHES 1970, 49–50) This passage is Montas’s 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 imperi - alism 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 Co - lumbus 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 isola- tion, 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 seventeenth 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 CLR JAMES JOURNAL Volume 20, Numbers 1–2, Fall 2014 128 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 co