Dash also argues, however, that this “cartographic impulse” is problematic because theHaitian space being mapped “had already been fixed in the modernist imagination as a utopian,
bountiful world” and owed too much to the influence of European Romanticism.^205 Durand
considered this poetry important enough to have devoted nearly his entire second book to the
nature of Haiti, but ambiguity expressed in devoting poetry to nature in “La voix de la patrie,”
indicates that Durand was very well aware of how his nature poetry could be viewed as
unoriginal or evasive from other national concerns. At the same time, it is by consistently
rooting his poetry in local landscape that Durand furthers his project as a national poet and
distances his inspiration from European literature. He hinges his descriptions not only on nature
and on tropical nature but also on the descriptions of specific flowers, trees, or birds uniquely
found in Haitian or Antillean space. The flora and fauna which the poet chooses to celebrate and
delicately describe are part of the local scene, the significance of whose names and
characteristics are tied to other elements of Haitian culture or language. These include, for
example, poems about the flowers called the “passiflore” and the “frangipane blanche” or birds
called the “ouaga-négresse.”^206 This local specificity within the universal appreciation for
nature’s beauty can also be traced to Herder’s tendency to see the particular in the universal and
to value individual and unique expression as part of the global environment.^207 Flowers are
described more than any other element in the Haitian landscape; the poet elaborates on their
natural simplicity and beauty which, while seemingly insignificant, is revealed to be poetically
(^205) Dash, The Other America 47.
(^206) I have not located “ouaga-négresse” in any current or nineteenth-century French dictionary, leading me to believe
it is either Durand’s coinage or a local Haitian term. “Passiflore,” however, is defined as follows: “1808, Jour. de
botanique, genre de plantes originaires de l’Amérique tropicale et de l’Asie [...] et qui doivent leur nom à la forme
de leurs fleurs, dont les organes évoquent les instruments de la Passion (couronne d’épines, clous, etc.). The
definition for “frangipane” is: ‘fruit du frangipanier, arbre ou arbrisseau originaire de l’Amérique tropicale dont les
fleurs ont un parfum voisin de la francipane.’ Grand Larousse de la langue française en six volumes, 1971 ed.
(^207) Herder xi.