Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

people and the link between two cultures separated in time but connected through shared

experience and poetry. It is partly for this reason that I have included it in this analysis.

Although it is only one poem about the Taino Indians, it is important to keep in mind that with

all nineteenth-century Haitian literature, other texts may have written which simply have not

been available or are still being discovered. The poem by Ignace Nau about the slave ship,

mentioned above, is another example. Moreover, a poem such as this demonstrates what themes

do not continue beyond this period: Haitian literature will rarely, beyond the 1830s, focus on the

Taino Indians.

As noted previously, the Taino and the African slaves have in common the oppression

by European colonial powers. The fact that these people had poetry vindicates them from

European prejudice. As Emile Nau stated in Histoire des cacïques:

La poésie était en effet une culture et une passion pour ce peuple qui appelle

“fleur d’or” l’une de ses reines, parce qu’elle était poète. Ce nom, ce mot a lui

seul révèle que les Haïtiens avaient réellement le sens poétique, l’imagination

délicate et impressionnable [...] Cela serait à peine croyable d’un peuple sauvage,

sans l’irrécusable témoignant de l’histoire...^120

More powerfully, of course, it is poetry which links the Taino to the Haitians in the

1830s. Haitian poetry as a genre finds a local justification, rooted in Caribbean tradition.

Haitian poets and historians like Emile Nau in early nineteenth century could therefore view

themselves as successors to the Taino historically as well as aesthetically, recuperating the

cultural losses of this civilization. “Laisser périr la pensée d'un peuple,” Emile Nau lamented,

“est ce qu’il y a de plus impérissable, est un crime plus barbare encore que de détruire jusqu’au

dernier rejeton de ce peuple.”^121

(^120) Nau Histoire des caciques 64.
(^121) Nau Histoire des caciques 65.