Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

revolutionary history and heroic celebrations. Munro, like Fischer, relies on previous criticism;

he cites Jack Corzani and Ulrich Fleischmann, whose studies from the 1970s also relegate Haiti’s

nineteenth century to blatant imitation and failure in originality.^14

The most frequent, although arguably misunderstood source for these viewpoints, is Ainsi

Parla l’Oncle by Haitian ethnologist Jean-Price Mars. In this 1927 study of Haitian peasant

culture, Price-Mars states that the Haitian elite, in copying the only model they knew, lost

cultural authenticity and suffered a “collective bovarysme” in seeing themselves as black

Frenchmen rather than as Haitians with an African heritage.^15 Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël

Confiant, novelists and literary theorists from Martinique, quote Price-Mars and apply the idea of

a “collective bovarysme” to characterize all Haitian writing from 1804 to 1915, claiming that

Haiti’s independence has been contradicted by an intellectual dependence on the French literary

tradition.^16 To arrive at their conclusion, they cite parts of only three texts: fourteen lines of

verse from the early Haitian Romantic poet Coriolan Ardouin, the Haitian novel Stella written in

1859 by Eméric Bergeaud, and Oswald Durand’s poem entitled “Choucoune,” which despite

being written in Creole still lacks Haitian authenticity.^17

Chamoiseau and Confiant’s all-encompassing dismissal categorizes an entire century of

Haitian works as completely homogeneous, not accounting for the variations during different

periods of the nineteenth century and overlooking the complexity present even within defined

(^14) See Jack Corzani, La littérature des Antilles-Guyane françaises, vol. 3 (Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1978) and
Urlich Fleischmann, Ecrivain et société en Haïti (Fonds St. Jacques, Sainte Marie, Martinique: Centre de recherches
caraïbes, University of Montreal, 1976.
(^15) Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi Parla l’Oncle: Essais d’enthographie (New York: Parapsychology Foundation, Inc., 1954).
Price-Mars, however, does not criticize all Haitian writers. In fact, he specifies that those who take their inspiration
from Haitian sources, even when writing in the ‘artifice’ of the French language, are authors of Haitian literature.
Among those he cites is Massillon Coicou whose poetry is the subject of this dissertation’s final chapter.
(^16) Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature
1655-1975 (Paris: Hatier, 1991) 80-81.
(^17) To my knowledge, Stella is the only novel written in Haiti during the nineteenth century.