Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

(Sean Pound) #1

other powers. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the United States was the last of the


Western powers to recognize Haiti’s independence in 1862, but the years of Haiti’s essential


non-existence for U.S. foreign policy meant that the Monroe Doctrine had in fact done little to


shield Haiti from European interests. American interest in Haiti had remained distant until the


United States tried to secure the promontory of Môle St. Nicholas in Haiti as a strategic naval


base in the Caribbean in 1891. Negotiations for this area failed, and the United States obtained


Guantánamo Bay in Cuba as a naval base in 1903. Franklin Knight calls the United States a


“reluctant imperialist” in terms of Haiti but specifies that the United States nonetheless wanted


hegemonic power in a dependent hemisphere.^178 The precarious nature of Haiti’s economic and


political viability which marked the last decades of the nineteenth century would eventually


culminate in the nineteen-year-long American Occupation which would begin in 1915.


Haitian intellectuals who wrote amidst such domestic instability and international

prejudice were generally united when defending Haiti to the outside world. Although


distinctions between blacks and mulattos were frequently made within Haiti in reference to


Haitian heads of states and even in reference to some historians, the same is rarely true for


essayists, prose writers, and poets writing after 1830. David Nicholls sets up a definition for


race and color which will be useful when discussing these complexities in Haitian society. He


explains that Haitians of both colors (black and mulatto), even from the time before the Haitian


Revolution when they were lumped together as “non-white,” accepted that they belonged to the


African or black race. He explains the racial unity that Haitians often embraced against the


West:


(^178) Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990) 224.

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