ostracism.^8 Sybille Fischer, who references Trouillot’s arguments of silencing, expands such
reflections to speak of a disavowal of the Haitian Revolution in the discourses of modernity. In
her 2004 study, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution, she argues that most accounts of the period that shaped Western modernity, accounts
which placed notions of liberty and equality at the center of political thought, fail to mention the
only revolution that centered on the issue of racial equality. She articulates the central thesis of
her book when stating that simply including Haiti in historical and cultural accounts is not
enough. Considering Haiti’s Revolution would mean a complete revision of the concept of
modernity itself, so that “what it means to be modern, who can claim it, and on what grounds can
become visible again.”^9
In all of these historical and theoretical considerations, including the previouslymentioned publications edited by Jensen, Munro and Walcott-Hackshaw, little attention is given
to Haitian literature, and even less to Haitian poetry, which followed and which so often focused
on the Haitian Revolution. If writing was indeed, as Michael Dash argues, “closely tied to
national identity” and “a strategy for achieving recognition in a modern global culture,” then
why has nearly a century of Haiti’s literature, written by Haitian mulattos and blacks after the
expulsion and extermination of whites in the revolutionary aftermath, also been obscured in
literary criticism?^10 Journals, essays, and historical accounts appear immediately after the
revolution by those claiming to be new Haitian nationals, and along with plays and other prose,
many of which have never fully been recovered, these writings continue throughout Haiti’s
(^8) Trouillot, Silencing the Past 98.
(^9) Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age or Revolution (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004) 24.
(^10) J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1998) 46. Italics my emphasis.