which led to this act would be frequently questioned, and attempts to uncover the details
surrounding his death and debates about his life works have been the subject of much curiosity
and controversy in Haitian letters. To date, no one comprehensive study has been devoted to the
poetry which preceded these fateful events.
More exclusively national and staunchly patriotic, for example, than Durand’s Rires etPleurs, Coicou’s 1892 collection Poésies nationales is closely tied to political events of the late
1880s and early 1890s. Coicou’s “national” poetry reveals insight into the reasons Romanticism
continued in Haiti through the end of the nineteenth century and into the often explosive and
dangerous intersections of Haitian literature and politics. Additionally, the dominant
characteristics of twentieth-century Haitian texts are already palpable in Coicou’s work. In this
chapter, I will therefore focus on the poems which comprise Coicou’s most celebrated collection,
paying particular attention to how he depicts Haiti’s difficulties and the overwhelming sense of
national failure due to an increasingly triumphant imperialism, internal corruption, and global
racism. I will also demonstrate that amidst Coicou’s prescient portrayal of Haiti’s demise
surfaces the conviction that Haitian national identity will be preserved through a commitment to
poetry, through recourse to certain ideas of history, and through gestures toward the new and
wider notions of spiritual community and racial solidarity.
Massillon Coicou was born in 1867 in Port-au-Prince.^246 His father, Pierre-LouisCoicou, was a native of the southern city of Jacmel and had been a baron to Emperor Soulouque
who ruled Haiti from 1847 to 1859. As an army general, Soulouque maintained control of Haiti
largely through military rule. These details are important to point out, as they highlight that they
(^246) Most of the biographical information about Massillon Coicou is taken from the following two sources: Raphael
Berrou and Pradel Pompilus’s anthology Histoire de la Littérature Haïtienne, Tome 1 as cited in previous chapters
and Jacquelin Dolcé’s Massillon Coicou: Textes Choisis (Port-au-Prince: Editions Choucoune, 2000).