Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

locate than other Haitian texts. I have found no collections of poetry and only extremely limited

biographical information about the poets themselves. This early poetry nonetheless contains

many of the classical allusions which later generations of Haitian poets will write against, and

the alexandrine verse, fixed forms of poetry like the epistle and the ode, and didactic tones will

still be present in various texts throughout the Romantic period.

An overview of the literature from 1806-1825 would not be complete without mentioning

the essays written by Henri Christophe’s secretary, Pompée Valentin de Vastey (1745-1820).

The son of a Frenchman and an African woman, this staunch apologist for Christophe’s regime

denounced mulatto hegemony in Haiti and condemned the internal divisions and civil wars he

traced directly to the poisonous vestiges of colonial society in French Saint-Domingue. Most

famously, Vastey authored in 1814 the first Caribbean critique of European colonialism and

defense of Haitian sovereignty entitled Le système colonial dévoilé, in which he states:

Le voilà donc connu ce secret plan d’horreur: Le système colonial, c’est la

domination des Blancs, c’est le massacre ou l’esclavage des Noirs [...] la

postérité ne croira jamais que c’est dans un siècle de lumière que les hommes

contestaient l’unité du type primitive de la race humaine uniquement pour

préserver le privilège atroce de pouvoir opprimer une partie du genre humain...^27

Vastey’s work, much of which has even been translated into English, has been examined

by several critics including Chris Bongie, who points out the ways in which Vastey offers a

comprehensive critique of colonialism as a system. Bongie argues that Vastey “was arguing in

remarkably modern terms for the necessity of ‘writing back’ against the Empire.”^28 Throughout

his essays, Vastey stresses the obligation of using the written word as a defense against ongoing

European injustices and as a vital step in national development:

(^27) Pompée Valentin Vastey, Le système colonial dévoilé (Cap Henry: Imprimerie du roi, P. Roux, 1814) 1,30.
(^28) Chris Bongie, “’Monotonies of History:’ Baron de Vastey and the Mulatto Legend of Derek Walcott’s Haitian
Trilogy,” Yale French Studies 107 (2005): 77-78.