In Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and early independent Haiti, side by side with the emergence of important political texts by (sometimes analphabet) former slave leaders working in tandem with secretaries, we find the documentation of Creole (Kreyòl) lyric poetry representing the experience of non-whites. This material aligns smoothly with contemporaneous descriptions of lyrical traditions by non-whites, but has often been identified as the work of colonists, who may more properly, in many cases, have been editors, co-authors, or print cultural mediators—“secretaries” of a different stripe—for the African diasporan creative verbal productions in which their society was steeped.

M.-E. Descourtilz was one of the few editors to have described such a process, in relation to the poem discussed at the close of Chapter 6:

Such processes point to the syncretic and halting trajectory of the emergence of this early phase of Haitian letters. It may seem to contrast starkly with the emergence of African diasporan literature in the Anglophone domain, but Robert Reid-Pharr has questioned the framing of “theoretical and historical practices” in African American literary studies to move from the eclectic and multilingual traditions of Africa and their diasporan adaptations to the apparent “Big Bang” of the slave narrative: