involvement in Haitian affairs, the poem urges Haitians to move beyond colonial hatred and
expand what was originally an anti-slavery revolution and reconsider an anti-white identity
politics. Haiti’s original revolution can assume a leading role in professing universal equality
that gives renewed meaning to Haiti’s national project. In light of these verses, Haiti can
embrace the idea of equality and promote peace among the races.
The continued relevance of Romanticism remains evident in both “Les forts” and “Lamort de nos cocotiers,” as it is Haiti’s existence as a Romantic subject which takes prominence.
The nation, suffering from an unknown disease, is replete with the contradictions intrinsic to
Romanticism. Haiti is simultaneously glorious but grievous, admired but isolated. The
beginning of “Les forts,” evokes this solitude immediately:
Comme ennuyé de son impeccable beauté,
De la perfection de son stipe, un palmiste,
Droit, dans la solitude immense, jaune et triste...
...Sa flèche d’or trouait les hauteurs vides. (1-4)These verses convey the majesty of the tree but also the emptiness which surrounds it; thegrandeur of its existence remains in a sort of meaningless void. The tree’s established
uprightness here and in other verses alludes to its old age and implies that the poet is referring to
Haiti in a post-independence state, alluding to the very time in which Durand was writing.
Although Haiti’s political isolation would be implied, given that Haiti was alone its in
independence in the Caribbean and surrounded by Western powers, the poem’s progression also
suggests a separation more temporal in nature. With the third and final part of the poem, the
shadows of past heroes surface to explain more concretely the present description of this tree:
La nature est avare en hommes héroïques,
Et le siècle n’est plus des antiques géants...
Où sont les vieux martyrs, les lapidés stoïques,
Les colosses debout au bord des océans? (27-30)