ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what it means to try to trace history in the lakou, Haiti’s rural historical institution of family land. Through historicizing the rural agricultural plain outside of the Haitian city of Gonaïves, it demonstrates that the lakou is a place that retains a critical narrative of Haiti’s self-liberation from French colonial rule, as a site of embodied memory and as it is described across historical movements documented and preserved in archives. Drawing from archival documentation in addition to oral and ethnographic interviews, this chapter contributes to a more complex understanding of Haitian history within rural space as historical landscapes. The contemporary rural perspective that “the land [of the lakou] cannot be lost” in spite of being legally sold, signals the way that the lakou collects narratives around it, attesting to histories of enslavement, colonial power, revolution, and the realities of life for agricultural laborers under the Haitian state.
