“Proof(s) of Memory”

Abstract

THE fin-de-siècle HAITIAN POET MASSILLON COICOU SAW poetry as a way to reflect on the past. In his 1892 collection Poésies nationales,1 Coicou dedicates individual poems to events, historical figures, and his literary forebears with poems entitled “Toussaint-Messie”, “Vertières”, “A Toussaint-Louverture”, “A Pétion”, “A Christophe”, “A Oswald Durand”, as well as others, all composed in alexandrine verse. Among the titles dedicated to Haiti’s founding fathers there is one glaring absence: no poem carries the name of Jean-Jacques Dessalines. At a glance, the Haitian bard’s omission may appear as a disavowal of the ideas that Dessalines has come to represent, such as anti-colonialism or the ethno-national unity inscribed by Haiti’s first leader in articles 12–14 of his 1805 Constitution.2 A closer look at the poems reveals that one of Coicou’s primary poetic concerns in Poésies nationales is to sift through the legacy of civil war in Haiti that was inaugurated with Dessalines’s murder at the Pont Rouge on 17 October 1806. Instead of situating Dessalines in the titles of his poems, Coicou weaves the memory of Haiti’s first emperor throughout the collection in poems addressing Dessalines’s assassination – “Une voix sur le Pont Rouge”, “Sa Tombe”, “Exaltation”, and “Au Cimetière” – in addition to others on the theme of civil war. Chief among Coicou’s Dessalinian poems in Poésies nationales is “L’Alarme” which opposes Haitian revolutionary struggles during the civil wars waged in Haiti throughout the nineteenth century, on paper, in the halls of the government, on both sides of the island of Ayiti Kiskeya,3 and within the Haitian family. The poem begins with an eerily familiar call to arms, “Entendez-vous ce cri qui retentit: ‘Aux armes!’ / Encor l’horreur! encor du sang! encor les larmes!” (Do you hear the cry that rings out: ‘To Arms!’ / More horror! More blood! More tears!).4 In subsequent lines, the poet quickly establishes the morbid gist of the poem, revealing that the present battle cry is not ripped from the glorious, anti-colonial past, but instead rooted in the sorrow of an ongoing civil war: