Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

Si le créole est indéniablement la langue première du réel de ces lieux, n’en est

pas moins considéré comme une sous-langue, un patois, un “mauvais François,”

[...] Dépourvu d’orthographe, privé d’équipements scripturaux (grammaires,

dictionnaires,) écarté de l’école et de l’administration, le créole en écriture doit se

faire intuitif [...] Par contre, l’écrit en français mobilise “Le Livre” et “L’Ecole,”

lieux d’apprentissage des “règles” de l’écriture selon l’expression de Barthes.^42

Considered a sub-language, Creole could not be at this time the language of modern

writers. Moreover, it was with modernity, with France’s plantation economy in colonial Saint-

Domingue that writing in French entered this Caribbean space. Print culture, via the established

colonial newspapers and the arrival of French texts, arrived in the colony and continued to be

present even after independence.^43

If scholars accept and articulate the expression of modernity in the Caribbean via a

number of venues, then written language and literature in French must also figure into this

equation. Several studies have explored the ways in which modernity was expressed in the

Caribbean from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century and through Western industrialism

and the plantation economy, through colonial exploration and exploitation in general, and

paradoxically, through political enlightenment ideologies. The works I have already referenced

by Fischer, Dash, McD. Beckles, and additionally by David Scott, all address the notion of

modernity in its various aspects not just in the Caribbean but in Haiti in particular.^44 Especially

when it comes to pointing out modernity’s contradictions, notably the reality of African slavery

with the ideals of freedom, it is frequently in Haiti and in the Haitian Revolution that these

(^42) Chamoiseau 70.
(^43) In addition to the European publications which arrived in the colony, several journals and newspapers, produced
locally, circulated in colonial Saint-Domingue in the mid to late eighteenth century. These include Moniteur général
de la partie française de Saint-Domingue [Cap François] 1791-1793, and L’Observateur colonial, [Les Cayes] 1700s
among others.
(^44) David Scott in Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment reexamines James’ The Black
Jacobins, a seminal anti-colonial text as “a particularly insightful and provocative instance – of the problem of
writing critical histories of the postcolonial present.” David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of
Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) 15, 115.