Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

in spite of this failure is one of the great paradoxes of his work. If we return one final time to

“Cauchemar”, we see that as in others poems, the reasons imperialist nations target Haiti are not

only based on what it has to offer, materially or militarily, but they also relate to what might be,

in the mindset of Western imperialism, morally permissible. For Coicou, racism is the

underlying tenet, and success of a black nation the ultimate offense to imperialist nations:

La force est votre droit, et le droit est notre crime.

Qu’un peuple noir soit libre et travaille et s’anime,

Et lentement prospère, et vive sous les cieux :

Que cela soit ainsi, c’est un crime à vos yeux. (15-18)

The nightmare, as this poem reveals, is not brought on solely by fear of foreign invasion,

but by the horror of the justifications, already in place, which allowed and would continue to

allow such aggression. In fact, the poet suggests that hatred for a black nation is the real reason

for invasion, as money, we may recall from earlier analysis, was a pretext. Once again, we are

reminded of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s contention in Silencing the Past that Haiti’s ‘failure’ was

imminent, as its success was unthinkable given the racist ideologies which governed western

paradigms of freedom. Trouillot’s insight about the Haitian Revolution echoes Coicou’s late

nineteenth-century observations, that Haiti’s ‘failures’ were willfully intended by nations who

not only ostracized the black republic for more than half a century but whose systematic racism

meant pervasive intolerance of Haiti’s economic, political, and military viability.^290

The title of “Cauchemar” takes on yet an additional meaning later in the poem, signaling

a nightmare for the foreign invader who expects his victories to go unchallenged. As in “Le

Supplice du Noir,” later verses in “Cauchemar” provocatively suggest a new era in which

colonial superiority wanes to the rise of the black race:

(^290) Trouillot’s text is also mentioned in relation to Susan Buck-Morss’ “Hegel and Haiti” essay in the introduction to
the Chapter on Ardouin’s and Nau’s poetry in this dissertation.