Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

notion of poetry which attests to a general humanity denied to those of the black race in much of

nineteenth-century Western thought.

It is interesting to point out that Firmin also discusses along with these Haitian writers

Alexandre Dumas père, whose name also appears in Rires et Pleurs, and who is the only non-

poet among the French writers whom Durand quotes in his collections. The choice for both

Firmin and Durand is far from arbitrary, for many Haitian writers have long pointed out that

Dumas’ paternal grandmother was a slave from the Haitian town of Jérémie. Firmin points to

Dumas as a “remarkable example of métissage,” whose literary talent obviously disproves the

theory of racial degeneration through hybridization.^218 A series of articles on Alexandre Dumas

also appeared in the first edition of the journal Haïti littéraire et sociale in January 1905 in Port-

au-Prince. Its editor Frédéric Marcelin begins a series of articles on Dumas with this

introduction:

Je n’ai la prétention de refaire ni la biographie de Dumas fils, ni celle de son père

et de son grand-père. Toutefois le monde entier sait – et sans doute aucun Haïtien

n’ignore – que sans la négresse de Jérémie cette glorieuse trinité n’eut pas existé.

Ces trois grands hommes sont donc de notre sang.^219

Durand himself points out in an article he wrote for the same journal that he and Dumas

shared this relative in common, Marie-Cessette Dumas. Durand praises this Haitian woman

without whom he and Dumas would never have existed. While literary traditions have

established Dumas’ status as a French writer and Durand’s as a Haitian one, these discussions

begin to blur the lines of distinction enough to provoke questions about how nations claim

writers and about the categories used to classify them. Haitian poets and journalists in this way

anticipate the French/francophone debate more than a century before such fields formally

(^218) One of Gobineau’s arguments, which Firmin refutes and exploits, is that pure races degenerate physically,
intellectually, and morally, through their contact and subsequent offspring.
(^219) Haïti littéraire et sociale, janvier 1905: 25.