Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

(Sean Pound) #1

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 of

subjectivity. 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 prolific

nineteenth-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

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