Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

On les embarque pêle-mêle

Le négrier, immense oiseau

Leur ouvre une serre cruelle

Et les ravit à leur berceau. (5-8)

The “Betjounnes,” or “les filles d’Afriques,” are no longer mentioned by name, referred

to instead in the anonymity of simply “them,” while the slave ship increasingly takes on a life of

its own. The rather unpoetic “c’en est fait,” begins the poem’s last stanza:

C’en est fait! le navire

Sillonne au loin les mers;

Sa quille entend l’eau bruire

Et ses matelots fiers

Aiment sa viole blanche

Qui dans les airs s’étend

Et son grand mat qui penche

Sous le souffle du vent.

Car à la nef qu’importe

La rive qui l’attend;

Insensible elle porte

Et l’esclave et le blanc! (22-33)

The present tense of verbs throughout the poem and in this part especially coincides with

the breadth of the slave trade which is not only far reaching in space but also in time. The

destination of “La rive qui l’attend,” in fact cannot be so easily specified, given that slavery and

the slave trade were still occurring throughout the Caribbean and North and South America into

the 1830s. In this way, what comprises part of Haiti’s pre-national past simultaneously reflects

current happenings in countless other destinations. Finally, the poem’s ideological scope is

equally as broad, as this practice harms not only the enslaved Africans but the white colonists as

well. The syntactical position of insensible means that it applies on the one hand to the ship,

whose indifference to where the voyage leads essentially implies the indiscriminate nature of

slavery. On the other hand, it also communicates that the white man and the slave are rendered

numb, morally dead, by this horrible enterprise. In both instances, this ending insists on the