dans la chaîne.” The sadness of the poem’s ending, however, is less about abandonment than the
continued longing of the poet for the woman he still loves.
Michael Dash concludes that this poetic failure is about the impossibility to posses theHaitian landscape and about the need to go beyond a nationalist script in Haitian poetics.^235
Dash qualifies this statement by explaining that the poem’s overriding message is that the black
male poet cannot freely love the Haitian woman and therefore cannot completely claim the
Haitian landscape, even in Creole. I do not disagree with this assessment. However, it is
precisely this opposition between Creole and French which merits further analysis, especially
considering that “Choucoune” is the only one of two poems in Rires et Pleurs written in Haitian
Creole. If within the poem speaking French represents a foreign and unwelcome presence, one
which interferes with the poet’s pursuits, then is Durand’s entire poetic project, by extension,
undermined by his use of French? Is Durand in fact implying that Haitian poetry will never be
free of this French presence and will always be a poetry in chains? Given what we have seen of
Durand’s poetry as a whole, it seems difficult to accept that in the space of a single poem he
would relegate his entire collection to poetic failure. If we consider, however, that this poem, as
others we have seen, can also reveal a certain irony when it comes to the poet’s subjectivity, a
certain power in this helplessness, then the poem’s message is certainly more complicated.
I have not uncovered a precise explanation for why “Choucoune” was composed inCreole, especially at a time when Creole was not a written language and had no official
orthography. Perhaps the problem exposed is so serious a manifestation of imperial power that
putting the words in French, like in the poem “A qui croire?” would constitute too much of a
betrayal. On one level, it could be argued that some matters, especially those which so pervade
(^235) Dash, The Other America 49.