Despite the many historical references and essays by Emile Nau and others published inL’Union, there is to my knowledge only one other poem which features the Amerindians of
Hispaniola. This is Ardouin’s short poem, “Une matinée,” which begins with a quote about
Eden from Genesis. The poem contains a warning to an Indian girl that a Spaniard is
approaching:
Cora! Ta pirogue rapide
Arrive et t’appelle a son bord!
Apporte à l’Espagnol avide
Ces paillettes et ces grains d’or. (15-18)With so few remnants of Taino culture having survived long-term in Haiti, and with 90%of the population of exclusively African descent, it is not surprising that poems with Amerindian
themes did not survive in Haiti into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Another factor may
well be the little mentioned fact of the loss of the Eastern half of the isle after Boyer’s abdication
in 1843. Though rarely given much critical attention, the period of the 1830s included Haiti’s
reign over what is now known as the Dominican Republic. Few entries in L’Union allude to the
east, although a Dominican city is listed as one of the places where the journal can be purchased.
According to Haitian professors Raphaël Berrou and Pradel Pompilus in their anthology of
Haitian literature, Coriolan Ardouin spent a few years on the eastern side of the island.^122
Sybille Fischer in her work Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery inthe Age of Revolution includes a chapter on nineteenth-century Dominican literature, discussing
literary activity of the Dominican Republic during Haitian rule. Overall, she concludes that
“cultural life is difficult to assess” and is ‘full of silences, unchartered spaces.”^123 There was no
newspaper activity in the east until after 1844, but Fischer does note that remnants of popular
(^122) Berrou and Pompilus 132.
(^123) Fischer 181-182.