Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

1.0 INTRODUCTION

The events of January 1, 2004, marking the bicentennial of Haiti’s independence from France

and the founding of the world’s first black republic, occasioned celebration but also protest

against the government of then Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When unrest turned to

armed struggle just two months later, the echoes of Haiti’s historic revolution, the result of the

only successful slave revolt in history, combined with its subsequent legacy of political

instability and relentless poverty to capture media attention around the world. Reflecting on the

intense media coverage of those months, Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw state:

Suddenly, too, everyone has an opinion on Haiti. Curiously, these opinions are

themselves echoes of the past, shaped as they are around long-standing

proprietary misinterpretations of just what Haiti “represents.”^1

For many observers, they note, these opinions translated into recycled fears of Haitian

violence, albeit at a safer distance via the television screen than two hundred years before. More

positively, the bicentennial and the surrounding events prompted dozens of conferences and

publications like the one quoted above, calling attention to the nation which so often falls

through the cracks of academic disciplines. Haiti, despite its geographical location, has rarely

been encompassed under Latin American and Caribbean Studies; its French and Haitian Creole-

speaking citizens are isolated in a Hispanophone-dominant hemisphere. Haiti typically doesn’t

(^1) Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural
Aftershocks (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006) ix.