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Engagement, Exile and Errance: Some Trends in Haitian Poetry 1946-1986

1992; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2932017

1080-6512

J. Michael Dash,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Jacques Roumain (1907-1944) on modern Haitian writing in general and poetry in particular. It is not Roumain's early lyrical poetry nor even his mood poems cast in the indigenist mode that have cast a long shadow on recent generations of Haitian writers. It is rather Roumain's incarnation of the idea of the intellectual as vagabond, as global ideologue, as well as his insistence on the relationship between poetic vision and political praxis, which have had a pervasive effect on the poets who have succeeded him. Driven into exile in 1934 for Communist activities, Roumain signals an ideological break with the early Nationalist and Indigenous movements. It is the Roumain of the Forties whose ideas represented an epistemological rupture with Noirisme or what would later be known as Negritude, and whose contacts included Nicolas Guillen, Alejo Carpentier and Langston Hughes, who stirred the imagination of young Haitian poets. As the epitome of the poet as radical exile, as spokesman for an international community of the dispossessed, Roumain redrew the map of Haitian poetry in this shift away from the navel-gazing parochialism of postoccupation poetry toward what can almost be seen as a valorization of the state of exile. Roumain's true legacy can be located in his fertile encounter with other cultures, in the multilingual thrust of his writing, and in his emergence as a virtuoso of the polysemic text. The universalist anchored in his own traditions is, perhaps, what Jean Brierre had in mind when he proclaimed at Roumain's funeral that the man was dead but Nous garderons le Dieu [The God is still ours]. Roumain's wanderings seem equally to anticipate Rene Depestre's erotic vision of geolibertinage and the sentimental education of Comrade Eros. Indeed, Depestre's own words point to the profound impact of the cosmopolitan presence of Roumain in Haiti in the postwar period: