Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

have termed a civil war from 1888-1889. The black general Légitime was briefly president until

another member of Haiti’s emerging black elite, Florvil Hyppolite, assumed power, and the civil

war officially ended in 1889.

Most of Coicou’s poetry, ultimately published in 1892, was written just prior to

Hyppolite’s presidency or in its earliest and most turbulent years, including not only the civil war

but also a revolt that occurred in 1891 and which Hyppolite brutally repressed. The lack of

correlation between politics and color in Coicou’s texts reflects the political reality that dissent

was occurring more frequently among black leaders, thereby providing one of several reasons for

Coicou’s repeated emphasis on “la race noire” in his national poetry. It is true that Coicou was

to my knowledge the first Haitian poet who could not be identified with the mulatto minority but

whose family was, as previously noted, part of Haiti’s black and military elite.

The second and more obvious point to be emphasized from those verses in “Réflexions”

has to do with the thought of national death, an idea announced in Coicou’s introductory poem

and which continues to haunt the collection. This national death, we come to see, is linked to

collapse from within as much as it is to aggression from without. Its use, however, is literal,

symbolic, and rhetorical. There are certainly real reasons for political collapse in Haiti. There

are also real reasons why Haiti will not live up to the revolutionary aspirations put forth in its

original fight from slavery and prescriptions put forth in its founding documents. Additionally,

here, the poet likely doesn’t mean he wishes for national death but by means of urgent pleading

argues that a willed death would be better than Haiti’s current course and general complacency,

especially considering Haiti’s long-standing and self-appointed mission to represent freedom for

those of the African diaspora. Ceasing to exist is better than the failure which Haiti symbolizes

for the black race. All of this comprises part of the poet’s “reflexions” where the central