The Kingdom of This World

Carpentier's northern Haiti runs from the sugar plantations of the Plaine du Nord and the colonial port of Cap-Français, through the night of the slave uprising, to the mountaintop kingdom that the freed slave Henri Christophe built for himself. The map holds the plain, the city now called Cap-Haïtien, the palace of Sans-Souci at Milot and the fortress of the Citadelle above it, with a single excursion across the water to the Cuban exile of Santiago.

Ti Noel

The plantations of the Plaine du Nord

Part One

The story begins in slavery, on the sugar estates of the plain behind the port, where an enslaved man works for a French planter and listens to an older captive tell of African kings and of a coming reckoning. The Plaine du Nord was the richest sugar country of the colony, worked by tens of thousands of enslaved people, and it is where the mind of revolt first takes shape in the book.

Part One

inferred The novel sets its opening among the sugar estates of the northern plain without fixing one property, so this marks Plaine-du-Nord, the plantation district inland from Cap-Français.

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Ti Noel

Cap-Français, now Cap-Haïtien

Part One

The great port of the north is where the enslaved come to market and where colonial power stages its spectacles, including the public burning of a rebel leader in the square before a crowd of masters and slaves. Called Cap-Français under France and later Cap-Haïtien, it was the wealthiest city of the colony and the stage on which the book's early terror and defiance play out.

Part One

explicit Carpentier names the colonial capital of the north, Cap-Français; the city is today's Cap-Haïtien, and the coordinates mark its historic centre.

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