maintained during Pétion’s rule.^166 The very ending of the poem, however, returns to the poet,
whose dream has conjured up this national spirit and this meditation on the memory of
revolutionary martyrs. Poetic vision has made this renewal and call to unity possible:
Sur tes jeunes martyrs des révolutions
Tes lèvres murmurent des bénédictions ;
Puis, d’un vol tu revins vers la terre bénie
Que ton cœur lui promit de veiller, ô Génie! (118-121)All three poems are literally revolutionary in the way they portray the nation’s foundingevent. We can again ask the questions, not only of why mulatto poets feature black leaders and
slaves, but why they stress mulatto commitments to African causes, and ultimately why they
write about the Haitian Revolution in the terms that they do. Returning to Sybille Fischer’s
study, we are reminded of how the significance of the Haitian Revolution was denied in the
accounts that shaped Western modernity. Referring to Haiti’s Revolution, and to the slaves in
particular, Fischer writes that in Western histories: “Slaves vanish, first literally, through the
institution that cloaks them with invisibility, and then conceptually, in the abyss between the
social and the political. Revolutionary antislavery is a contradiction in terms. Haiti becomes
unthinkable.”^167 Given what we know of this period, surely it was not inconceivable to Haitian
poets in the 1830s that such a disavowal of Haiti’s Revolution, were the silence not broken,
could happen even in Haiti where the events had occurred. Although one can always point out
what these Haitian poets were not writing (descriptions of the Haitian peasant, for example), it
seems more productive to focus on what comprises the writings which are available. Among the
(^166) Haiti’s flag changed numerous times during the nineteenth century. King Henri Christophe, for example,
adopted a flag with two horizontal colors of yellow and red. The original flag created by Dessalines was the French
tricolore with the middle white strip removed...symbolizing the removal of white rule and the unity of blacks and
mulattos (red and blue). This flag was maintained by Pétion in the years of Haiti’s division (1806-1821).
(^167) Fischer 9.