poems and quotes could have indicated that a “Haitian-Dominican culture was emerging.”^124 In
the east, Fischer explains, this would have been in the form of poems which were pro-Haitian or
pro-Boyer in sentiment, as all other writing was either highly censored or non-existent. In the
west, however, poets like Ardouin and Nau may have accounted for the Dominican presence
through themes like nature and the Taino which would have applied to both parts of the island, to
the landscape of the entire area, and the history of Haitians and Dominicans alike. Once
separated from the east, there would be even less of a reason to continue to write about the
Taino, and poems more focused on the Haitian Revolution and African culture would thrive as
markers of national identity. Dominican literature in the nineteenth century, on the other hand,
was according to Fischer very reluctant to identity with its African past and almost never
mentions slavery. The Indian tradition, however, continues to prosper in Santo Domingo
throughout the nineteenth-century, where
Against all evidence to the contrary, Spain and the Indians come to be considered
the ancestors of the mulatto nation through fantasies that variously and in
disregard for their mutual exclusivity imagined Dominicans to be the heirs of the
Spanish Golden Age, Catholicism, and American indigenous cultures.^125Fischer explains that Anacaona and Caonoabo keep reappearing in Dominican literatureas part of the “nostalgic celebrations of the noble indigenous race.”^126 Like Ardouin’s “Une
matinée,” there are also texts which describe how “the utopia of a new Garden of Eden gives
way to the degradations of conquest and genocide.”^127 Anacaona specifically, in fact, is even
more of a Dominican icon than a Haitian one. Captured near what is now Port-au-Prince, she
was executed near the Dominican capital. Eventually, Hispanism and indigenism became the
(^124) Fischer 182.
(^125) Fischer 152.
(^126) Fischer 154.
(^127) Fischer 160.