Haiti: The Land Where negritude First Stood on its Feet

This essay looks at two significant periods in Haitian aesthetic and literary history—Haiti’s pre-Negritude writings, and its writers of the Negritude period. In the 19th century, there was a ferment of ideas and a burst of creative literary output by Haiti’s writers and artists which helped to shape the character of their country and incline it towards modernism. The revolutionary feats of its leaders—such as the organizational genius Toussaint L'Ouverture (c.1743? – 1803), François Dominique, (c. 1744–1803), generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Boukman—are now part of slave history. But little known is the fact that in the African diaspora as in the Western hemisphere, Haiti occupies a singular position as the repository of authentic African values outside of Africa. Haiti served as the inspirational model for the inception of the Negritude ideology. Also, in the 1940s and 1950s, Haitian writers were at the forefront of literary movements, philosophical ideologies, and new trends in art. In Le Discours Sur Le Colonialism (1955 – Discourse on Colonialism: A Poetics of Anticolonialism), Martiniquan radical intellectual Aimé Césaire proclaims that the history of Haiti concretizes the prehistory of the Negritude ideology. Césaire had begun to make connections between Africa and the Antilles or West Indies and concluded that Haiti is the most African of all the Antilles (Caribbean countries).