Poetry of Revolution: Romanticism and National Projects

Once again Coicou inserts a reference to ancient Rome. Sempronia refers to women of

the prominent Sempronius family in the Roman Republic. Coicou’s poetry demonstrates that

Haitian writers were not “trapped” in the singularity of their own heroic revolution.^295 Rather,

poets like Coicou were well aware that their revolution was as historically relevant as any

republican revolution and that the revolution itself had been preceded by and followed by other

acts of slave resistance. The earlier verses about snuffing 1804 from the womb are ambiguous,

in that the word order leaves unclear if it is the African genius which hatches the Revolution or

vice versa. What these verses and this poem highlight is that no one type of resistance is

superior to the other, and that Haiti is as central to the African community as Africa is integral to

some of Coicou’s thought. Resistance to slavery which took many forms (marronnage, suicide,

etc.) expanded beyond the temporal and geographic scope of the final months of the Haitian

Revolution. As Carolyn Fick argues:

Slave resistance to the brutality and human degradation of the system took many

forms, not all of them over, and some of them even self-destructive... Indeed, the

first instance of resistance, and of suicide as resistance, occurred about these slave

ships...For those unable to escape being boarded as captives, suicide was a fatal

affirmation of their refusal to accept the conditions of bondage imposed on

them.^296

The poem comes to a close with a heightened spiritual sentiment. The final verses

describe her choice as sublime in its power to affect nature, soften enemies, and transform

thinking for the ultimate benefit of humanity. She takes on a super-human strength which

transports her in this moment of sacramental sacrifice. “Martyre” in these final verses takes on

the full force of its religious connotation as the sea becomes the site of a violent baptismal:

(^295) J. Michael Dash argues precisely against this perception in “Haiti Chimère: Revolutionary Universalism and its
Caribbean Context,” Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks 11.
(^296) Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: The University of
Tennessee Press, 1990) 47.