Le blanc disait: « Toussaint expire!
« L’aigle est tombé dans nos filets!
« Rage impuissante! vain délire!
« Ils redeviendront nos sujets!« Et nous rirons de leur défaite
De leur orgueil, de leur espoir!
La liberté n’était point faite
Pour l’homme qui porte un front noir. » (13-20)Ardouin’s poem, like Nau’s poem to be studied shortly, highlights the achievements ofDessalines over those and after those of Toussaint Louverture. It seems significant that both
poets would choose this hero, given that it is Toussaint who is much more frequently written
about in nineteenth and twentieth-century texts within and outside of Haiti. It is Toussaint, for
example, and not Dessalines, who is the subject of a poem by William Wordsworth, a play by
Alphonse de Lamartine, multiple poems by Haitian poet Oswald Durand, as well as the
aforementioned biography by Aimé Césaire. It is, as Césaire writes in all capital letters,
« TOUSSAINT, TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE ,» who is included in the verses from his Cahier
d’un retour au pays natal.^150 When examining history, however, it would seem that Dessalines
as the heralded national figure would represent more the rule than the exception; it was
Dessalines who renamed Saint-Domingue Haiti, created its flag, and commissioned the
vehement declaration of independence, severing ties with France and resisting the two
hegemonic systems of slavery and colonialism. As Hardt and Negri point out in a chapter on
colonial sovereignty of their work Empire, Toussaint’s actions and speech revealed his ambitions
to remain within the French colonial system, seeking liberty and equality in “an interconnected
world” but not necessarily national independence.^151 They refer to Toussaint’s writings, and
(^150) Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, ed. Irele Abiola (1935; Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2000).
(^151) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) 118.