known for their longstanding resistance to colonial and local powers.^131 It is therefore likely that
the term ‘Bochimens’ in Ardouin’s poem is used more figuratively, meaning that those who
captured the Betjouannes were “bandits,” general “barbares,” as the poem refers to them.
Perhaps already by the nineteenth century, Haitians had heard of ‘bushmen’ in a pejorative sense,
with little real knowledge of Africa. In Ardouin’s text, the Bushmen are also compared to
hyenas, intelligent predators native to Africa whose dominance in the food chain is surpassed
only by that of the lion. According to myth in some parts of Africa, men would turn into
“hyenas,” at night and ferociously hunt their prey.
Consideration of the term “Bochimens” invites the reader to reflect upon the multipleproper names which make up the poem. The poem fits into a pre-national history of Haiti
specifically because of Africa as the context, but beginning with the title, most of the proper
names in the text do not refer to any people or geography directly part of Haiti’s slave history.
Returning to the title, “Les Betjouannes,” the best meaning and explanation for this term,
according to Kirsten Fudeman, can be discerned with knowledge of Bantu languages.^132 “Be” as
a prefix in Bantu languages is a marker for human plural, while ‘tjouan’ could be read as the
phonetically similar ‘tswan’ that we find for example in the name of the country Botswana.
Made feminine in French by adding the second ‘n’ and then, ‘e,’ the term likely refers to women
of the Botswana area. This explanation seems solid, given that “Bechuanland” was the former
name for Botswana when it was still a British protectorate, and that other references, to the
Bushmen, for example, also involve southern Africa. Southeastern African references exist as
well: the word Amirantes in the first section “La danse” refers in reality to a group of islands in
the Indian Ocean. At least in part, this makes the scene exotic. The ambiguous way that the
(^131) Sandy Gall, The Bushmen of Southern Africa (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001) 49-76.
(^132) Kirsten Fudeman, personal interview, 7 February 2006.