Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

sings. Another untitled, unfinished poetic fragment puts the dilemma in the form of a direct

question as to what poets under adverse conditions should do:

L’oiseau dont l’oiseleur a dépouillé le nid

Et qui voit le barbare enlever son petit

Demande-t-il au ciel de ternir son plumage

Ou ne chante-t-il pas, triste sous le feuillage?

Il chante! Le vallon l’entend chanter encore! (1-5)

The second stanza affirms victory despite the obstacles. As Lespinasse’s quotes make

clear, despite the elitism inherent in writing poetry in Haiti at this time, and a literary heritage

tied to France, poems such as the ones viewed here nonetheless served as a prerequisite to and a

component of the development of a national literature. The essence of a national consciousness

rested first and foremost with important individual poets writing amidst so much literary and

political change. In the aspects we have seen thus far of Ardouin’s and Nau’s poetic projects,

there are traces of an awakening to a national reality which supersedes allegiance to one leader or

government, and this is first manifested in an attachment to Haiti as a physical reality.

2.3 PRE-REVOLUTIONARY PASTS AND THE MAKING OF NATIONAL MYTHS

It is consistently with Haitian history, however, that editors in both publications place an

emphasis when it comes to elaborating distinctive markers of national identity. Returning again

to the first issue of Le Républicain, dated August 15, 1836, one reads in E. Z Demiveux’s article

“De la nationalité, de la communauté des peuples, that “une nation se justifie par l’histoire et se

légitime par la philosophie.” Addressing all Haitian readers, he also writes “Inspirez-vous de