realization that writing in French is clearly not the language of Haiti’s rural community. As
Pierre suggests, however, it is impossible to bring glory to Manoune and to the nation if writing
in Creole means others outside Haiti will not recognize his efforts. On so many levels, this poem
underscores the dilemmas, contradictions, and varying perspectives on Haitian poetry.
Love is shown to be most painful in poems in which the white male intruder possessesthe power to interfere between the black male poet and the Haitian woman he loves. Only two
poems in the second book of Rires et Pleurs are specifically set in colonial Saint-Domingue,
prior to independence and hence prior to the abolition of slavery. These two sonnets are both
called “Amour d’esclave,” although the title comes to reveal the contradiction of the terms as
there is no love between the slave and her master. In the first sonnet, the female slave speaks
about the violence which accompanies her master’s passion. This “love” story is recounted in all
its perversion by a woman who is naïvely indifferent to the perpetual violence which plagues her
life. In the second sonnet, the slave woman is very aware of her situation and is almost complicit.
The white plantation owner promises that her children will be free as part of this exchange.
Hiding in the dark, however, is Tembo, a black male slave ready to kill the master when the time
is opportune. Trickery, abuse, and bribes for freedom all work to stage the inequalities in these
power relationships that make the exercise of real love impossible in such settings. These two
poems clearly find their way into Durand’s collection for reasons Edward Said cites in Culture
and Imperialism. These dynamics, set in a previous period, are part of an investigation to see if
what happened in the past is indeed still happening.^228 Allegorically speaking, these poems
again imply how foreign powers seduce the Haitian nation and that Haitians do not always resist
this corruption. Other poems in Durand’s collection cast this same scenario in the shadow of
(^228) Said 3.