and political journals Le Républicain and L’Union, and the poetry by Nau and Ardouin, I
speculate on the ways in which silencing may already have seemed prescient to these Haitian
intellectuals.
I introduce the personal poems of both writers as they relate to Romantic notions ofsubjectivity. As articles in the aforementioned journals also reveal, the issues of elitism and
imitation are nuanced in light of Haiti’s efforts to modernize literature and establish community
within and beyond national borders. In the entries to these journals several Haitians write that
they recognize the limitations of literary activity in an impoverished and nascent society, but
they nonetheless call for poets to write in the name of national interests. The construction of
national identity in Nau’s and Ardouin’s poems is expressed partly through poems about local
landscape, an additional characteristic which differentiates this poetry from that of the preceding
generations. Two poems about Haiti’s pre-revolutionary past, notably the demise of the Taino
Indian population and the African slave trade, present the horrors of colonial violence and the
imagined bond the Taino and their African successors forged in their common oppression. I also
highlight the poems about the Haitian Revolution, aspects of which may already have been
forgotten in Haiti of the 1830s. Subjectively, these texts serve as Haiti’s earliest history before
more official historical accounts came about even within Haiti.
The second chapter is a study on the poetry of Oswald Durand, Haiti’s most prolificnineteenth-century poet whose diverse collection Rires et Pleurs (1896) contains three decades
of personal and national poems. I begin once again with historical information of this period.
This includes growing color divisions in Haiti and an overview of the racist rhetoric in Western
texts which specifically targets Haiti in the second half of the nineteenth century. Biographical
information about Durand includes his relationship with mentor and friend Demesvar Delorme