Creating Diasporan Nationalism

From the Parisian Parnassus of the Revue contemporaine in 1856, the French journalist and diplomat Alexandre Bonneau airily laid out the seemingly impossible stakes of an original new Haitian literature. It would have to be an Afro-American, tropico-Haitian corpus; in French, yet unlike French literature; inspired by genius, but a genius other than the Haitian “genius for imitation”; and certainly not in Creole, because for Bonneau it seemed safe to say, after all, that blacks were “big children.” The multiple “catch 22s” of this pronouncement include the insinuation that Haitian writers were only black if they wrote in Kreyòl, and that a local Creole and black literature, which would ostensibly qualify as Afro-American and tropico-Haitian, and thus as not purely imitative, was simultaneously impossible for racial reasons. Bonneau's less than helpful prescriptions echoed Gustave d'Alaux's 1852 warning that “it is not by imperfect or notably delayed imitations, it is by originality alone” that Haitian writers would “force their way in.” Such backseat driving would lead the Haitian writer Louis Joseph Janvier in 1883 to spend a substantial part of a 635-page treatise foaming at the mouth over the commentary provided by “visitors.” For his defense of Haitian literature, Janvier had recourse to a French Romantic poet, Alfred de Musset, who was also frequently accused of being derivative. “Let us remind you of this, my clever fellow,” says Janvier to his cultural opponent: “‘Plant a cabbage, and you have copied someone.’”