will flow more beautifully and easily. Poems about the Haitian Revolution can only be told if
the poet had the plume of Dante. He implies that his Haitian identity prevents him from
recounting the heroic events he nonetheless goes on so powerfully to describe. The subject in
Durand’s collection is less overtly revolutionary than the Revolution he so heroically portrays,
but throughout the collection the inferiority felt by the black, Haitian poet, seems to be at times
both real and ironic. The coexistence in Durand’s poetry between the powerful bard noir and the
poor black poet leaves undisturbed the portrait of the Haitian poet as economically inferior and
socially disempowered. The very dual nature of this subjectivity, however, powerfully indicates
that inequality is not, as Firmin would also argue, intellectual.
3.8 LEGACY AND CONCLUSION
Such tensions in Durand’s poetry reveal how complexities in Haitian texts wereinevitable and intended in nineteenth-century Haiti. Although rooted in Romanitc modes of
poetic expressions, Haitian writers like Durand struggled to work against but also within the
pervasive racial theories of the era. It is undoubtedly the combination of all of these poems and
more which led to the government decision in 1905 to award Durand a government pension of
250 gourdes a month to subsidize his writing. Although the poems most tied to Haitian political
and cultural realities seemed most significant to this decision, other Haitian intellectuals cited
different reasons for such merit. Frédéric Marcelin, editor of Haïti littéraire et sociale in 1905,
had this to say about the pension: