Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

presence of the other, further complicating the situation and increasingly Haitian vulnerability at

this point in history. The “Batchs,” referring collectively to German aggressors, had been

mentioned in an earlier poem in Coicou’s collection, one called “A Oswald Durand” Coicou

precedes this poem with an epigraph from Durand’s 1871 poem “Ces Allemands.”^280 The

message of Coicou’s “A Oswald Durand.” is that he thinks of Durand’s earlier verses in light of

the Batch affair. Coicou too is outraged at this constant German aggression: “Quand je vois

l’Allemand louche qui nous affronte /[...] Je vois brandir tes vers poignants, rouges de

flamme...” (5, 10)

Although the United States is not named specifically in “Cauchemar” as in other poems,

Coicou rightly recognized American culture, economic practice, and political encroachment as a

serious threat to Haitian identity. The U.S. invasion of 1915 was the culmination of American

influence and aggression which Coicou had despised and envisioned years before the actual

military event. As its pejorative title indicates, the poem “Yankisme” is overtly anti-American

and is interesting if only for the fact that it is the one poem in Coicou’s collection to contain un-

translated English phrases. These verses tend to respect the metrics of the given verse, but their

insertion stands out in the French-language text. “Yankisme” begins with the following stanza:

“Il faut de l’or –ou rien—pour être, --ou ne pas être,

Time is money. Le crime aussi.

Or faisons fi du bien; car l’honneur enchevêtre;

C’est par le mal qu’on réussit. (1-4)

“Time is money” as its own saying apparently carried enough meaning without the

necessity of translation. Although this quote of Benjamin Franklin’s from the mid-eighteenth

century has been interpreted in various ways, it is negatively associated here with the dawning of

the modern industrial age, with the new attitudes that accompanied mass production, and with

(^280) The complete epigraph is: “Nous jetâmes l’argent, le front haut, l’âme fière, /Ainsi qu’on jette un os aux chiens!”