Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

movements. It goes without saying that for their evaluation, as for those of more recent critics

like Fischer and Munro, misunderstandings stem largely from not reading the Haitian texts

themselves. To be sure, there is tremendous difficulty in even locating texts written prior to

1915, as original publications were limited in number and surviving copies are found in few

locations worldwide. The editors of the three volume anthology of Haitian literature published

in Port-au-Price in 1975 make frequent reference to literary texts that they know to have been

written but whose traces, through political conflict, library fires and other disasters leave even

these Haitian researchers with a fraction of what they know to have been written.^18 In addition

to neglecting close readings of Haitian poetry, these responses also fail to consider the political

and social settings in which Haitian poets were writing. Ignoring the complexity of these factors

leads to privileging certain characteristics which are more prevalent and more desirable from a

twentieth-century viewpoint: opacity over transparency, cultural difference over racial equality,

avant-garde poetry over Romanticism, Haitian Creole and not the French language.

J. Michael Dash, in a 2004 article about the Haitian essayist, anthropologist, and

politician Anténor Firmin, is the first critic to my knowledge to contest the principles underlying

any of the above assessments. Interestingly, he too cites the Créolistes Chamoiseau and Confiant

and explains their indictment of Haiti’s nineteenth century in this way:

This is the case because revolutionary ideologies in the francophone Caribbean in

the 1930s were constructed around myths of rupture and innovation [which]

condemned the nineteenth century as a time of blind imitation. This is one of the

defining characteristics of identity politics promoted in such radical journals as

Légitime Défense, Tropiques, and La Revue Indigène [...] Current interest in

crosscultural negotiations and suspicion of the nativist impulses of the explosive

(^18) Raphaël Berrou and Pradel Pompilus, Histoire de la littérature illustrée par les textes, Tome 1 (Port-au-Prince:
Editons Caraïbes, 1975).