Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

Le soleil qui se couche est jaloux de l’éclat

De la lune limpide et calme qui se lève; [...]

Et puis, comme daigner nous tendre encore la main,

Alors que vous criez que l’on n’est pas des hommes

Etant des nègres. Soit, mais nègres que nous sommes,

C’est pourtant sans forfaits, sans être jaloux,

Sans haïr les petits que nous grandissons, nous. (26-27, 31-34)

The verses begin with peaceful nature images and consonance, especially with the

repetition of “l” sounds in the first few verses. In contrast, the enjambement between the verses

beginning with “Alors” and “Etant” works to accentuate what comes in the second part of verse

30, a sort of punch-line with the surprising claim “mais nègres que nous sommes.” The word

“nègre” is doubly emphasized in the syntactic reversal in this verse precisely to call attention to

how the very humanity of the Haitian population was denied once again because of race. Anne

Gulick’s recent study of the 1805 Haitian constitution emphasizes the novelty of this document

which “identified both blackness and humanity as the basic signifiers of citizenship.”^291 In this

subversive refiguring, Gulick argues, Haiti would claim political legibility not in spite of but

because of its blackness.”^292 Coicou’s poetry as a whole represents a similar refiguring, with the

African diasporic community a central component of this project. Aware of the battles for

abolition of slavery in Brazil in the late 1880s for example, he authors a poem of encouragement

to Dom Pedro II whose daughter ultimately had the decree signed into law in 1889. Les “nègres

du Brésil” would remember his actions despite the protests from other citizens. Coicou’s poems

also refocus Haiti’s national past even for renowned revolutionary figures most commonly found

in nineteenth-century Haitian poetry such as Toussaint Louverture. For example, poets and

politicians in the past as in the present frequently refer to the deportation of Toussaint by

(^291) Anne Gulick, “We Are Not the People: The 1805 Haitian Constitution’s Challenge to Political Legibility in the
Age of Revolution,” American Literature 78:4 (December 2006): 802.
(^292) Gulick 808.