sphere. If, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates, nations are defined by a determining culture
feature, then a shared history may have been the least contentious and most compelling means of
imagining for all Haitians.^161 Or, could the answer be the most powerful one, the one which
makes Ardouin and Nau not only truly “national” poets but historians before history so to speak,
who did not want the events and significance of the Haitian Revolution to be forgotten? Given
the importance accorded to history in the Romantic period, is this how Haitian poets decided to
intervene discursively in a story of the past?^162 Did they sense that the story of the Haitian
Revolution, which prevented the return of slavery to the island and resulted in the world’s first
black republic and the second independent nation in the Western hemisphere, could be lost to
future generations? Moreover, could Haitian poets have realized, as Susan-Buck Morss puts it in
interpreting the Hegelian dialectic, that it is the slave who becomes the agent of historical
progress?^163
The slave is characterized by the lack of recognition he receives. He is viewed as
“a thing:” thinghood is the essence of slave consciousness –as it was the essence
of his legal status under the Code Noir. But as the (Hegelian) dialectic develops,
the apparent dominance of the master reverses itself with his awareness that he is
in fact totally dependent on the slave. One has only to collectivize the figure of
the maser in order to see the descriptive pertinence of Hegel’s analysis: the slave-
holding class is indeed totally dependent on the institution of slavery for the
“overabundance” that constitutes its wealth. This class is thus incapable of being
the agent of historical progress without annihilating its own existence. But then
the slaves...achieve self-consciousness by demonstrating that they [...] are
subjects who transform material nature.Part of this transformation, as the ending of Nau’s poem reveals, relates to landscape.After the slaves’ uprising and Dessalines’ declaration, the poem concludes by returning to
(^161) Trouillot, Haiti: State Against Nation, 23-24. This is especially the case, I would argue, considering all the other
apparent differences between Haiti’s elites and the larger population, including French/Creole language,
Vodoo/Catholic religions, and rural/urban living.
(^162) Bann 81.
(^163) Buck-Morss 847-848.