Haitian poetry experienced a shift, beginning as early as the 1870s, away from nationally inspired themes toward a greater insistence on poetic form and a penchant for contemplative verse. Poets often pondered abstract notions like the passage of time or the mysteries of nature. Other times they chose to write from the anguish of personal experience, mourning the loss of love to death or betrayal. Their melancholic reflections were not necessarily devoid of politics. Poets Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire composed their own eclectic poetry years before contributing to the famous journal La Ronde. Theirs is a poetics of ‘disenchantment’, a term that permeates the pages of the journal and characterizes their reactions to Haiti’s distressing domestic and international political situation. I offer an assessment of these three key poets and of the journal, affirming and going beyond the idea of the ‘understated political aspect’ of the movement. I demonstrate that the politics occasioning and emanating from this poetry embody distinctly Haitian calls for literary perseverance, a prescient battle for national preservation to which La Ronde is dedicated.

This chapter reads twentieth-century Haitian fictions of the Haitian Revolution to address how the political uses of Haiti’s independence war have made it a difficult literary subject for Haitian writers. The political custom of using Haitian revolutionists to express partisan political aims is prevalent in Haiti, so much so that it is the socio-political context animating Haitian narratives of the Revolution. I read Marie Chauvet’s novel, Dance on the Volcano (1957); René Depestre’s Vodou epic, A Rainbow for the Christian West (1967); Évelyne Trouillot’s novel, The Infamous Rosalie (2003); and Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel, Quiet Dawn (1990), fictional autobiography, I, Toussaint Louverture, with the Complicit Pen of the Author (2004), and novel, One Hour for Eternity (2008), and consider how each of these works addresses the exploitative uses of the Revolution in the prevailing political discourses of their time. I examine the painful intimacies of socio-political disunity presented in their writings, showing how creative treatment of the Revolution requires, at worst, questioning the Revolution’s success and, at best, resigning oneself to its unfinished nature.