geographically distanced from the French Romantic writers they were reading and admired.
Benedict Anderson, in his seminal work Imagined Communities, argued that the creation of an
imagined, national community was greatly facilitated through print capitalism.^94 For these
reasons, these more personal poems, however commonplace they may seem, further express the
dilemmas of Haitian poets and their search for community, for this simultaneous linkage, as
Anderson describes it, both within and beyond national borders.^95 The journals themselves,
besides establishing community among the Haitian French-reading public was also one of the
few spaces where Haitians could experience international interaction. Le Républicain and
L’Union contained constant information about world events, drawing on journalistic sources
from Europe, the Caribbean, and the U.S. It is overwhelmingly obvious from reading L’Union
that the economic and diplomatic isolation of Haiti was devastating to Haitian intellectuals. In
the articles preceding the introduction of Hugo’s Les voix intérieures, for example, editors
lament the limited contact with Europe and the virtual lack of all political and commercial
connection between Haiti and neighboring islands as well as with the U.S. Such concerns
perhaps outweighed, at least at certain moments in their poetic careers, the need to promote local
concerns or exhibit traces of an undeniable Haitian identity.
When it comes to literature, Haitian poems and essays are literally placed side-by-sideFrench texts in L’Union. It remains a little known fact, however, that Nau and Ardouin’s poems
were also published in Parisian reviews like La Revue des Colonies, a publication edited by
Cyrille Bissette, a Martinican merchant of mixed European-African descent who spent most of
his life exiled in France.^96 Anna Brickhouse, in her book Transamerican literary relations and
(^94) Anderson 35.
(^95) Anderson 33-35.
(^96) Cyrille Bissette, ed., La Revue des Colonies [Paris] 1834-1842.