engineers, scientists, and industrialists.^282 Coicou, however, lamented the decline of the arts at
the expense of technological development and correlated a mechanical existence with American
influence. In an 1898 article in the literary journal La Ronde Coicou defends Haiti’s intellectual
traditions against American emphasis on material development:
Nos littérateurs de théâtre ont tous fait volte-face. La science et la politique,
l’indifférence et la mort se les ont partagé [sic]...Mais je n’insiste pas, car j’ai
trop peur de heurter dans leurs croyances souveraines ceux qui clament la
nécessité de chasser les poètes de notre république et de mécaniser notre vie en
américanisant nos moeurs.^283Coicou was among those Haitians who had argued that commitment to literature andother arts in Haiti was needed to counteract theories of racial inequality and to demonstrate that
indeed people of African descent excel in artistic and literary endeavors. Additionally, Coicou
remained a defender of the moral and spiritual value of letters and culture, embracing the
Romantic vision of the poet as divine emissary and national spokesperson. As these poems
outline them, Haitian battles are cultural as much as they are historical and economic.
These poems illustrate how Coicou’s poetry contributes to an understanding ofinternational politics as they relate to Haiti during this pivotal period of the late nineteenth
century. They reveal that Haitian identity, nearly a century after independence, was still
inescapably linked to conflict, in terms of military aggression, certainly, as well as to other
oppositions to be discussed later. In Coicou’s portrayals and predictions, the recurring menace
of foreign involvement, directly related to domestic tensions, is a recurring force in shaping
Haitian national sentiment, for better of worse, as Haiti moves into the twentieth century.
(^282) Nicholls 104.
(^283) Coicou 78.