Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

world and its inhabitants.”^6 In this way, Trouillot highlights the beginning of what would

continue to be Haiti’s immeasurable challenge of entering modernity when the already

established global relations of power would refuse the Haitian experiment. The following

citation summarizes the major markers of Haiti’s achievement which consequently led to

Western silencing:

The Haitian Revolution expressed itself mainly through its deeds, and it is

through political practice that it challenged Western philosophy and colonialism.

It did produce a few texts whose philosophical import is explicit, from

Louverture’s declaration of Camp Turel to the Haitian Act of Independence and

the Constitution of 1805. But its intellectual and ideological newness appeared

most clearly with each and every political threshold crossed, from mass

insurrection (1791) to the crumbling of the colonial apparatus (1793), from

general liberty (1794) to the conquest of the state machinery (1797-98), from

Louverture’s taming of that machinery (1801) to the proclamation of Haitian

independence with Dessalines (1804). Each and every one of these steps –

leading up to and culminating in the emergence of the modern “black state,” still

largely unthinkable until the twentieth-century – challenged further the

ontological order of the West and the global order of colonialism.^7

It was this established global order, with the United States, France, England, and the

Vatican in the most powerful positions, which reinforced this silencing throughout the nineteenth

century. Given the dominance of these powers at the time, the Haitian Revolution was not only

obscured in written records, but Haiti in general was also relegated to failure and barbarism in

the following decades. As further details in this study will elucidate, Haiti was ostracized

diplomatically and economically. Its independence went long unrecognized and then came at the

expense of an enormous financial debt to France. As Trouillot also explains, the Haitian elites

played their own dubious role (a point to be emphasized especially in the final chapter of this

dissertation), but the political and economic deterioration of Haiti was largely due to this

(^6) Trouillot, Silencing the Past 73.
(^7) Trouillot, Silencing the Past 89.