Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

[...]their racial consciousness stemmed from this recognition and from a

determination to combat theories of racial inequality; they wished to demonstrate

the capacity of members of the black race to achieve progress [...]Race was

throughout the nineteenth century a unifying factor among Haitians.^179

This explains why many poets from Haiti will hence claim to be black poets even if their

partly European ancestry may more rigidly classify them as mulattos. In Oswald Durand’s

poems, the subject identifies himself as a “poète noir” or “le barde noir.” The same is true of

Jacques Roumain, whose interests in the 1930s and 1940s remained with the African-based

traditions of black peasants, or of René Depestre, who as recently as 1992 declared his long-

standing position as a “poète noir.”^180

For nineteenth-century Haitian poets, it is often difficult for scholars to obtain even basic

information about family history. Some important biographical information about Oswald

Durand is available in anthologies and other texts, but there are many details about his life which

remain difficult to trace. Pradel Pompilus, the Haitian professor who researched Durand’s works

more extensively in the 1960s, often refers to his own lack of findings surrounding certain

aspects of Durand’s life.^181 It is known that Oswald Durand was born in 1840, just three years

before Boyer’s downfall in the northwestern city of Cap Haitian. His father, Louis Dolcé

Durand, was a mulatto, born to a French father and African mother. Little, however, is known

about Durand’s mother Aricie, except that she was the daughter of the mulatto writer Pompée

Valentin de Vastey (1735-1820). This famous secretary of Haitian king Henri Christophe is

credited with writing the first non-European critique of colonialism in his 1814 essay, Le système

(^179) Nicholls 202.
(^180) René Depestre, Anthologie personelle (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 1992) 2. Paul Laraque, introduction, When the
tom-tom beats : selected prose and poems by Jacques Roumain, trans. Joanne Fungaroli and Ronald Sawyer
(Washington D.C. : Azul Editions, 1995).
(^181) Oswald Durand and Pradel Pompilus, Poésies choisies, avec une étude biographique et littéraire, des notes
explicatives, des jugements, des questions et des sujets de devoirs (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie des Antilles, 1964).