Discussing early Haitian Poetry written in Creole brings the researcher outside their usual field of investigation (literature) as they have to sift through antropological texts to locate those early texts. As a result, Oswald Durand’s Choucoune is considered as the first literary work written in Haitian Creole even though there is evidence of prior texts published and/or written in that language. Similarly, Georges Sylvain’s Cric? Crac! is the first collection of poems published by a Haitian writer. This chapter offers an overview of this early poetry in Haitian Creole, followed by a more detailed examination of Sylvain’s Cric? Crac! with a view to identifying the characteristic features of this poetry and establishing a connection with Haitian popular culture. The ‘bare-footed poets’ from the countryside are recognized for the influence left on their urban educated counterparts, particularly through the chante pwent, which appears to be a consistent feature of Haitian poetry in Creole up to today.

This chapter explores Jean Fouchard’s body of work on the history of culture and literacy in Saint-Domingue and its implications for the study of the long-term history of Haitian literature. Fouchard’s books, I argue, opened up portals into the worlds of Saint-Domingue that had previously been evoked in certain writings but not explored in the depth he offered: indigenous cultures and their continuing legacies, theatre, music, dance, and a constellation of handwritten texts produced by both enslaved and free people of African descent, and through these the broader cultural and intellectual visions and aspirations of these communities. Fouchard saw the history of writing, and literature, in Saint-Domingue as part of a deep and long process stretching from colonial times to the present day, and to identify continuities between different eras. Ultimately, Fouchard’s collective of work, which can be seen as all part of a larger overarching project, asks of us to see the cultural and literary history of his country holistically, as a connected and enduring series of struggles driven by a search for true expression, and therefore freedom.

This chapter considers socialist intellectual Roumain’s significance as a creative writer and political activist whose shadow looms large over twentieth-century Haitian letters. Looking closely at Roumain’s singular position as an internationally circulating witness to and participant in critical moments in both Haitian and global history, Chemla offers a thorough accounting of Roumain’s astonishing impact on literary modernity. He argues that while Roumain wrote of the specific context of the US American occupation and the rise of Indigenism, the insights and perspective that mark his essays and prose fiction likewise anticipated the fascist, colorist statecraft of the Duvalier regime from its origins in the Indigenist perspectives and racialized thinking of the late 1920s. Chemla places Roumain at the center of an extended network of thinkers, writers, and political actors in France, the United States, and throughout the Caribbean.

This chapter delves into the profound interplay between Haitian revolutionary history, literature, and the broader context of global romanticism. Drawing on the pivotal work Le Romantisme en Haïti: La vie intellectuelle, 1804-1915 by Dolcé, Dorval, and Casthely, it critiques the dominance of Western thought and the triumph of Eurocentrism in global romanticism. Through a meticulous exploration of Haiti’s post-independence history and its relationship to French colonialism, it asserts the emergence of a distinctly national form of romanticism deeply entrenched in the country’s intellectual and literary evolution. Tracing the trajectory of Haitian romanticism from its roots in the Haitian Acte de l’Indépendance to the commencement of the US Occupation, it argues that Haitian poets’ blending of politics, history, and literary creation resonated with, at the same time as it transcended, romantic ideals popular in the British and French traditions. Fusing historical scholarship and literary critique, the chapter aims to reshape perceptions of Haitian intellectual history, unearthing the obscured ties between revolutionary actions, poetic expression, and the global romantic movement.

Building on the hypothesis of the Proclamation by Dessalines in Gonaïves on January 1, 1804, as the primary textual source of the Haitian tragedy with its two main features, warning or caution and explanation or clarification, which largely defines the novels of the Haitian tradition, this chapter makes a detailed analysis of this corpus published both in Haiti and abroad between 1901 and 1961. Showing the coherence of this body of tragic stories reported in a Haitian French language by narrators claiming to be Haitian depicting Haiti and its inhabitants, it also demonstrates its historical diversity. Exposing the main stages of its evolution, it highlights the genesis of these works over four main periods: the 1900s, its emergence as national novel with the publication in 1901 of Thémistocle-Épaminondas Labasterre by Frédéric Marcelin followed in 1905 by Justin Lhérisson’s La Famille des Pitite-Caille and Fernand Hibbert’s Séna; the 1910s–20s, its decline after the US occupation of Haiti; 1931–50, its Golden Age with writers who get international recognition; and the 1950s, the rise of Jacques Stephen Alexis and the beginning of the definite fall of the genre.