Geggus, “had none of the liking for the white society which Toussaint and the former domestic
Christophe, shared with the anciens libres.”^157 As explained in this dissertation’s introduction,
Dessalines’ declaration of independence was an oral one in Creole, later to be written down in
French by his French-educated secretary, Louis-Boisrond Tonnerre. Somewhat
anachronistically, the poem describes the scene of Dessalines’ dictation as one which came in
response to the people’s commands. The following inscribes the orality of peasant folklore into
this literary history:
-“Purifions le sol des péchés de l’impie,”
Dit le peuple, et la torche alluma l’incendie,
Et Jean-Jacques, semblable à quelque esprit de Dieu,
Dicta l’indépendance à la lueur du feu! (26-29)Dessalines as hero and leader among slaves becomes a more powerful means ofconnecting his memory with the peuple, the predominately black rural population of Haiti in the
1830s. As we’ll see in Chapter 3, it is during the 1840s and 1850s that the noiriste/mulatto
versions of histories and politics fully develop, recovering Dessalines in their political discourse
as soon as the year after Boyer’s downfall:
The frustrations of the black population, which had manifested themselves
spontaneously and violently in the years following the fall of Boyer, increasingly
affected the ideology of the period [...] Noiriste writers praised Dessalines and
called for the complete rehabilitation of the liberator of Haiti.^158Dessalines’ presence in the poetry of the 1830s, even from a strictly chronologicalstandpoint, straddles a fine line between representing national unity and recuperating a contested
black figure.^159 Modern enough to have pronounced the founding of the Haitian state (compared
(^157) Geggus 26.
(^158) Nicholls 10 and 87.
(^159) Nicholls explains that by the 1870s, the National Black Party and the Liberal (mulatto) Party claim a black and
mulatto legend respectively, with separate historical versions, heroes, etc: Culminating the divisions that had