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.