Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

Les Français ont eu le droit d’écrire et d’imprimer contre nous....nous aurons

donc bien le droit d’écrire quelques pages pour notre juste et légitime défense [...]

Nous, noirs et jaunes, courbés depuis des siècles sous le joug de

l’esclavage...notre race encore dans les fers et dans les ténèbres [...] Nos lecteurs

n’oublieront pas que nous écrivons pour les étrangers, comme pour les

nationaux.^29

Vastey stresses writing as a right to be exercised, and he explicitly defines the readership

he envisions when making his arguments. This targeted audience of literate nationals and a

French-reading public abroad remains, I believe, unchanged throughout the nineteenth century.

As I will comment at greater length, only writing in French as opposed to Creole would even

allow for the possibility of domestic and international reception. Most interesting in Vastey’s

texts, I find, are the deficiencies he cites in his own writing. As Bongie also points out, Vastey

stresses that his own political writing, while crucially important, remains secondary to the higher

goal of developing literature. At the same time, however, he recognizes the overwhelming

obstacles which render this achievement difficult. Bongie states:

He stresses the limitations that come with being a mere ‘political writer’ [...], and

notes that the situation of urgency in which the recently decolonized nation still

finds itself gravitates against the emergence of an indigenous culture literary

culture, a ‘more stable foundation’ for the nation being required before a properly

Haitian writing can emerge.^30

It is during the 1830s, I intend to show, that this more stable political situation

materializes and that poetry begins to flourish.

In another one of his essays, Vastey already sees a literary culture unfolding, all the more

remarkable, he contends, given that Haiti’s foundations were that of a slave society: “...encore

dans son enfance, notre nation a déjà eu des écrivains et des poètes, qui ont défendu sa cause et

célébré sa gloire [...] l’haytien est parvenu à la civilisation après avoir été élevé dans

(^29) Pompée Valentin Vastey, Réflexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux français, concernant Hayti (Cap
Henry: P. Roux, 1817) xi, xviii and xxi.
(^30) Bongie 80.