damaging ramifications of a system to which many Haitian intellectuals expressed their
opposition in the pages of L’Union.
Minora, in this last section, is described for the last time on board the ship as “Cet angequi nous vient dans nos rêves du soir.” In his section entitled “The Quarrel with History,”
Edouard Glissant observed that in the Caribbean:
The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for
us, is however, obsessively present. The duty of the writer is to explore this
obsession, to show its relevance in a continuous fashion to the immediate
present.^135“Les Betjouannes” is in fact situated following a short prose piece called “Traditionafricaine,” and just prior to an article about the continued atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade.
The framing of this text then too situates it between African past and Caribbean present, between
tale and current events, between the realm of history and that of myth. Partly because of its
“generalizing tendencies,” (like those we see in “Les Betjouannes,”) Glissant describes myth as
something which “disguises while conferring meaning, obscures and brings to light, mystifies as
well as clarifies and intensifies that which emerges, fixed in time and space, between men and
their world. It explores the known-unknown.”^136 For both “Floranna la Fiancée” and “Les
Betjouannes,” Glissant’s words about the writer in a balkanized, fragmented region of the
Caribbean, also ring true for Haitian poets in the 1830s writing about remote times and places:
“It is the writer’s duty...to restore this forgotten memory and indicate the surviving links
(^135) Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1989) 63-64.
(^136) Glissant 71, 83.