

































Contemplating the Afterlife of Slavery: Gynecological Resistance, 
Marronage, and Revolution in Late Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue

Stephane Martin Demers 2T1
York University
Osgoode Hall Law School

Évelyne Trouillot’s novel The Infamous 
Rosalie makes it abundantly clear that slavery 
was deeply ingrained in all aspects of an 
enslaved person’s life. Enslaved expectant 
mothers in late-eighteenth-century 
Saint-Domingue contemplated the afterlife of 
slavery through acts of gynecological resis-
tance such as abortion and infanticide as well 
as marronage both in the novel and as a 
historical actuality. These acts of resistance 
laid the groundwork for the development of a 
collective liberation mentality among slaves 
necessary for the emergence of an independent 
Haiti and the creation of the first Black Repub-
lic. Black counter-historical narratives, such as 
Trouillot’s novel, can provide historians with a 
vantage point from which to understand how 
historical actors who are often silenced were 
some of the greatest agents of change and 
justice in the modern era. Enslaved women 
should occupy a space in scholarly literature 
and historical discourse that honors their 
actions as active agents in search of collective 
liberation and independence. 

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Slavery, Enslaved 
Expectant mothers, Gyneco-
logical resistance, Abortion, 

Infanticide, Marronage, 
Revolution

B I O

Stephane recently graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Music 
and a Minor in History. Stephane is currently pursuing his Juris Doctor at Osgoode Hall 
Law School at York University where he intends to combine his interests in music and 
law to create a more equitable and just law school environment and legal profession. 

© 2021 Stephane Martin Demers
Caribbean Studies Students’ Union, Canada - https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cquilt/

                       This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 
                       To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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    Évelyne Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, trans. Marjorie Attignol Salvodon, foreword by Edwidge Danticat (Lincoln: 
Nebraska Paperback, 2020), 19. 
    Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: the Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Urbana: 
University of Illinois Press, 2006), 6. 
    Crystal Eddins, “‘Rejoice! Your wombs will not beget slaves!’ Marronnage as Reproductive Justice in Colonial Haiti,” 
Gender & History 32, no. 3 (2020): 563, https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1111/1468-0424.12497.
    Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 119. 
    Eddins, “‘Rejoice! Your wombs will not beget slaves!’,” 563-564. 
    Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 82.
    Fred Moten, In the Break (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003), 14–22, 198–200, quoted in Saidiya Hartman, 
“Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11, muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
    Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 41.

       

 

1

Évelyne Trouillot’s novel The Infamous 
Rosalie makes it abundantly clear that 
slavery was deeply ingrained in all aspects 
of an enslaved person’s life. According to 
Michaud, a white overseer on the Fayot 
plantation, as a female slave Arcinte’s 
child was already a slave and punished 
before birth, forever marked by the whip 
of the overseer.”  To avoid this unfortunate 
fate, enslaved expectant mothers in late 
eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue 
performed acts of gynecological resistance 
with the help of Black midwives.  They 
also escaped the plantations on which they 
labored in hopes of liberating themselves 
and their unborn children.  The novel only 
hints at the ways in which enslaved 
women’s decision to kill infants – marked 
as slaves before birth – or to birth them 
beyond the confines of Saint Domingue’s 
plantations are informed by the larger 
historical context. This research contends 
that enslaved expectant mothers contem-
plating the afterlife of slavery through acts 
of abortion, infanticide, and marronage 
both in the novel and as an historical 
actuality laid the groundwork for the 
development of a collective liberation 
mentality among slaves necessary for the 
emergence of an independent Haiti and the 
creation of the first Black Republic. 

Confronted with the immutability of 
slavery and its attendant ubiquity of 
violence, enslaved expectant mothers’ 
vision of freedom would at first be 
squashed. Lisette, a Creole house slave 
and the daughter of an African-born 
bossale, had inherited the conditions of 
slavery through the traumatic memory of 
the experiences of her Grandma Charlotte, 
her great-aunt Brigitte – the midwife and 
healer for the Montreuil plantation, her 
godmother Ma Augustine, and her mother 
Ayoube, all of whom were aboard the 
Rosalie during the Middle Passage.  The 
violent and exploitative measures that 
white planters imposed on her ancestors’ 
bodies to increase crop yield and the 
number of births only worsened this 
memory.  However, enslaved women 
forcefully opposed colonial rule and its 
organizing logic in the decades leading to 
the Haitian Revolution. Importantly, 
gynecological resistance and marronage 
provided them with the avenues to choose 
their actions – an option so seldom accord-
ed to them.  Further, their choice was 
aimed at securing freedom for their unborn 
children. Imagining “the resistance of the 
object,” a phrase coined by Fred Moten,  
occurs at a juncture in the novel where 
Lisette and Fontilus are dancing with one 
another. Lisette states, “So often, with a 
bright, faraway look in his eyes, he would 
talk to me about a future we had to 
create.”  The nightmare of Marie-Pierre 

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     Trouillot, 88. 
     Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus. “The Haitian Declaration of Independence: January 1, 1804,” in Slave Revolution
in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: a Brief History with Documents (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 189. 
     Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 77.
     Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 41-42. 
     Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 93, 95.
     Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 57, 60. 
     Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 119-120.
     Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 57. 
     Weaver, 58. 
 

       

 

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(one of the “ship sisters” from Congo who 
boarded the Rosalie with Lisette’s ances-
tors) also sets the tone for the urgency 
with which enslaved expectant mothers 
would need to create this seemingly 
unattainable future.

In Marie-Pierre’s recounting of her 
nightmare to Lisette, dogs are giving birth 
to “brawling pups” in the “darkness of the 
barracoons.”  On the plantations of Saint 
Domingue, enslaved women gave birth to 
newborns who were already tethered to the 
institution of slavery. Even though their 
predetermined condition would subject 
them to a life of misery and misfortune, 
enslaved mothers went to great lengths to 
ensure their children did not become “the 
prey of these vultures [or white masters].”  
Elaborating on the dialogue between 
Lisette and Fontilus, Grandma Charlotte at 
a later point in the novel dreams of sever-
ing the chain of memory whose roots lay 
in slavery: “Perhaps one day we’ll no 
longer even remember [the word 
barracoons]; it will have perished with 
those of us who bore its mark.”  In spite of 
the great hardships that Lisette’s ancestors 
endured, and her own experiences of 
losing nearly everyone she knew and 
loved to slavery, enslaved expectant 
mothers’ were doubtfully hopeful that their 
acts of abortion and infanticide on the 
plantation would bring about the liberation 
they so desperately yearned for. 

Though enslaved women were among the 
least powerful in slave society, midwives 
used their privileged position to assist 
them in inducing abortions.  In doing so, 
midwives prevented enslaved women’s 
unborn children from becoming slaves and 
in turn undermined the institution of 
slavery. For example, due to her aversion 
toward birthing children who would be 
marked as slaves, Gracieuse, Master 
Fayot’s cocotte, had seven abortions, 
albeit without assistance.  Historically, 
midwives possessed knowledge about and 
used plants, such as the leaves of the 
avocado tree, that could bring on an 
abortion, a fact to which Poup-
pée-Desportes, an eighteenth-century 
French botanist, attests.  The abortive 
powers of enslaved women formed the 
liberating potential that was further 
realized through their infanticidal might. 

In The Infamous Rosalie, enslaved women 
used infanticide as an imaginative tool to 
bring about the liberation and indepen-
dence that they sought. Readers learn that 
the seventy knots tied around Brigitte’s 
mysterious cord represent the seventy 
babies that she killed and saved from 
slavery as a midwife on the Montreuil 
plantation.  Similarly, an Arada midwife 
who lived on the Fleuriau plantation in 
late eighteenth-century Saint Domingue 
wore a rope collar with seventy knots 
representing the number of children she 

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     Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 122. 
     Anthony Bogues, ““The Black Jacobins and the Long Haitian Revolution” with Anthony Bogues,” UIC Institute for the 
Humanities, Feb 3, 2015, YouTube video, https://youtu.be/yrjBXPHcNmU.
     Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 37. 
     Weaver, 56. 
     Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 3. 
     Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 90.
     Bogues, ““The Black Jacobins and the Long Haitian Revolution.””
     Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 95.

 

       

 

18

claimed to have killed.  Following these 
incidents, the emancipatory practice of 
inserting a needle in a baby’s brain 
through the fontanel at birth soon became 
a widespread practice in Saint Domingue.  
As Lisette contemplates the seventy lives 
“who will not have the chance to see the 
sun rise,” she comes to accept death as 
preferable to a life in bondage.  Literarily 
and historically, the emancipatory spirit 
grew beyond sites where enslaved expect-
ant mothers performed resistive acts.

However, French colonial officials 
adamantly suppressed the imagination of 
enslaved women and deemed slavery the 
culminative point of their lives,  restricting 
the scope and significance of gynecologi-
cal resistance. If planters witnessed 
midwives assisting enslaved mothers in 
inducing abortion or committing infanti-
cide, they would be severely whipped. 
Arguably worse, planters often forced 
pregnancy among enslaved women using 
an iron collar.  Despite the mechanisms 
that planters utilized to ensure they were 
profiting from the reproductive capacities 
of enslaved women, the latter found ways 
to circumvent these brutal measures. Even 
when offered incentives for bearing 
children, such as exemption from days of 
work in proportion to the number of 
children they gave birth to or granting 
them le libre de droit (complete freedom), 
they were steadfast in their refusal to offer 
up potential laborers.  By thwarting the 
cycle of productivity on which slavery 

depended, enslaved expectant mothers 
developed an independence of mind that 
would emerge in more concrete forms 
during the Haitian Revolution. 

Abortion and infanticide represented a 
kind of freedom only obtainable in death. 
Lisette, upon realizing that she holds 
strength in being a slave, ventures on a 
quest to “reanimate the dead”  and in turn 
to challenge the economic construct upon 
which slavery rests through marronage – 
freedom in life. Her training as a maroon 
begins when Vincent, her lover and a 
Maroon known as “the Fearless One,” 
thoughtfully utters, “Ants take their time 
to cross the road, but one day they reach 
the other side.”  This parallels Anthony 
Bogues’, Director of the Center for the 
Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown 
University, literal and metaphorical notion 
of “working through to get to another 
side.”  Lisette embraces the uncertainty of 
her journey as a Maroon so that her 
unborn child may be free. Prior to her 
departure, she also recognizes how 
Vincent’s and Gracieuse’s fates are bound 
together.  Though not immediately appar-
ent to her, readers will understand that in 
their respective acts of resistance, both 
agents imagined a world without slavery 
by unchaining themselves and in 
Gracieuse’s case, her children, from the 
bonds of servitude. 

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     Bogues, ““The Black Jacobins.”
     Eddins, “‘Rejoice! Your wombs will not beget slaves!’,” 575. 
     Eddins, 576. 
     Eddins, 576.
     Eddins, 573. 
     Eddins, 566. 
     Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, “The Haitian Constitution: 1805,” in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 
1789-1804: a Brief History with Documents (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 192. 
 
.

 

       

 

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According to Bogues, “revolution is the 
moment at which the idea of freedom and 
a new beginning coincide.”  Agents of 
gynecological resistance envisioned the 
possibilities of freedom, but it was the 
agents of marronage who awakened its 
embryonic potential. For example, 
enslaved women fled to autonomous 
villages away from the plantation to birth 
free and rebellious children.  In communi-
ties that thrived outside of the slave 
economy, the children of enslaved mothers 
were able to give free reign to their 
rebellious tendencies and form strong 
support networks consisting of other 
enraged and powerful Maroons.  Thus, 
enslaved expectant mothers’ marronage 
propelled the fully formed liberation 
mentality of Haiti’s independence into 
being by conjuring up an image of the 
slave as untethered to any external authori-
ty through acts of gynecological resis-
tance. 

However, in the same way that colonial 
officials responded with force to suppress 
abortion and infanticide, marronage did 
not go without punishment. If an enslaved 
woman (or any enslaved person for that 
matter) was seen fleeing the plantation or 
had already escaped, they would either be 
returned to their master, tortured by 
whipping or the use of hot irons, or 
murdered.  Considering the strict enforce-
ment of these brutal punishments and the 
added burden of being a woman, and in 
some cases a mother, female runaways 

made up an alarming 14 percent (1,858) of 
maroons from 1766-1791 in 
Saint-Domingue, as documented in Les 
Affiches Américaines.  Furthermore, the 
child-woman ratio in the Baoruco moun-
tains of Le Maniel, the most successful 
Maroon settlement in Haiti, was 2:1, 
suggesting that the free population was 
growing substantially.  Due in large part to 
enslaved women who became maroons, 
their children who were raised as free 
subjects and aware of slavery’s horrors 
became emergent revolutionaries by the 
time the Haitian Revolution had begun.

Enslaved expectant mothers believed that 
revolution would put an end to slavery and 
that their unborn children were essential in 
achieving this outcome. The collective 
spirit of liberation engendered by these 
women would contribute to the rise of 
notions of Haitian unity, independence, 
and protection from colonial interference. 
This is evidenced by artifacts like the 
Haitian Constitution proclaimed by 
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the leader of the 
Haitian Revolution. Article 2 states that 
“Slavery is abolished forever” while 
Article 12 goes a step further and affirms 
that no white man may ever enter Haitian 
territory or inherit Haitian property.  
Through inducing abortion, committing 
infanticide, and engaging in marronage, 
enslaved women envisioned a society 
radically different from their own, mostly 
to gain freedom for their unborn children. 
The victory that Haitian revolutionaries 

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     Trouillot, The Infamous Rosalie, 51.
     Trouillot, 7. 
     Trouillot, 129. 
     Dubois and Garrigus, “The Haitian Declaration of Independence,” 191. 
     Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 13. 
     Hartman, 4. 

 
.

       

 

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enjoyed in 1804 would not have been 
possible without a concerted and collec-
tive effort at forging a liberation mentality 
brought about by acts of reproductive 
resistance performed by enslaved expect-
ant mothers. 

In The Infamous Rosalie, Lisette simulta-
neously surrenders to and challenges her 
condition as a slave. On the one hand, she 
is unable to imagine life in the absence of 
slave society and its many actors.  On the 
other, she expresses a strong underlying 
desire to be free: “Dwelling within me is 
my true vision, the one that refuses all 
servility…so close, so far.”  After gaining 
knowledge that she was spared by Brigitte 
before her seventy-first attempt at infanti-
cide, Lisette decided to forge a new 
beginning away from the plantation and 
ensure the freedom of her unborn child. 
She declares, “Creole child who still lives 
in me, you will be born free and rebel-
lious, or you will not be born at all.”  
Lisette’s bold declaration and the liberat-
ing spirit it gives rise to bears a striking 
resemblance to Dessalines’ unwavering 
statement in “The Haitian Declaration of 
Independence”: “Vow before me to live 
free and independent and to prefer death to 
anything that will try to place you back in 
chains.”  What started as a doubtful hope 
of liberation expressed by Grandma 
Charlotte and enslaved expectant mothers 
becomes a deliberate undertaking for 
Lisette at the end of the novel. 

Decades before the Haitian Revolution 
had even begun, Lisette fiercely 
proclaimed freedom – as uncertain as 
obtaining it was. Her determination not to 
let the uncertainty of attaining freedom 
deter her from doing so animates much of 
enslaved expectant mothers’ efforts to 
gradually overthrow the institution of 
slavery through gynecological resistance 
and marronage. Even though Saidiya 
Hartman perceives accounts of the history 
of black-counter historical projects as 
failures,  they can nevertheless provide 
historians with a vantage point from which 
to understand how historical actors who 
are often silenced were some of the 
greatest agents of change and justice in the 
modern era. As “the incomplete project of 
freedom” unfolds,  enslaved women 
should occupy a space in scholarly litera-
ture and historical discourse that honors 
their actions as active agents in search of 
collective liberation and independence. 

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Bogues, Anthony. 2015. ““The Black Jacobins and the Long Haitian Revolution” with 
           Anthony Bogues.” UIC Institute for the Humanities. 3 February. YouTube video. 
           https://youtu.be/yrjBXPHcNmU. 
Dubois, Laurent, and John D. Garrigus. 2006. “The Haitian Constitution: 1805.” In Slave 
           Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: a Brief History with Documents. 
           Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dubois, Laurent, and John D. Garrigus. 2006. “The Haitian Declaration of Independence: 
            January 1, 1804.” In Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: a Brief 
            History with Documents. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 
Eddins, Crystal. 2020. “‘Rejoice! Your wombs will not beget slaves!’ Marronnage as 
            Reproductive Justice in Colonial Haiti.” Gender & History 32, no. 3: 562-580. 
            https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1111/1468-0424.12497. 
Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2: 1-14. 
            muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
Trouillot, Évelyne. 2020. The Infamous Rosalie. Translated by Marjorie Attignol 
            Salvodon. Foreword by Edwidge Danticat. Lincoln: Nebraska Paperback.
Weaver, Karol K. 2006. Medical Revolutionaries: the Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-
            Century Saint Domingue. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 

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