Once again Coicou inserts a reference to ancient Rome. Sempronia refers to women of
the prominent Sempronius family in the Roman Republic. Coicou’s poetry demonstrates that
Haitian writers were not “trapped” in the singularity of their own heroic revolution.^295 Rather,
poets like Coicou were well aware that their revolution was as historically relevant as any
republican revolution and that the revolution itself had been preceded by and followed by other
acts of slave resistance. The earlier verses about snuffing 1804 from the womb are ambiguous,
in that the word order leaves unclear if it is the African genius which hatches the Revolution or
vice versa. What these verses and this poem highlight is that no one type of resistance is
superior to the other, and that Haiti is as central to the African community as Africa is integral to
some of Coicou’s thought. Resistance to slavery which took many forms (marronnage, suicide,
etc.) expanded beyond the temporal and geographic scope of the final months of the Haitian
Revolution. As Carolyn Fick argues:
Slave resistance to the brutality and human degradation of the system took many
forms, not all of them over, and some of them even self-destructive... Indeed, the
first instance of resistance, and of suicide as resistance, occurred about these slave
ships...For those unable to escape being boarded as captives, suicide was a fatal
affirmation of their refusal to accept the conditions of bondage imposed on
them.^296
The poem comes to a close with a heightened spiritual sentiment. The final verses
describe her choice as sublime in its power to affect nature, soften enemies, and transform
thinking for the ultimate benefit of humanity. She takes on a super-human strength which
transports her in this moment of sacramental sacrifice. “Martyre” in these final verses takes on
the full force of its religious connotation as the sea becomes the site of a violent baptismal:
(^295) J. Michael Dash argues precisely against this perception in “Haiti Chimère: Revolutionary Universalism and its
Caribbean Context,” Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks 11.
(^296) Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: The University of
Tennessee Press, 1990) 47.