Nous mourrons tous, The Haitian Revolution goes Underground
In a lengthy 1967 interview held in Havana with Rene Depestre, Aime Cesaire may have made one of the most unintentionally misleading claims regarding the Haitian revolution when he declared that “the first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians.” Curiously, this interview was never publ...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Stockholm University Press
2018-09-01
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| Series: | Karib |
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| Online Access: | https://www.karib.no/articles/47 |
| Summary: | In a lengthy 1967 interview held in Havana with Rene Depestre, Aime Cesaire may have made one of the most unintentionally misleading claims regarding the Haitian revolution when he declared that “the first Negro epic of the New World was written by Haitians.” Curiously, this interview was never published in French but within a few years became widely available in English in the Anglophone Caribbean and the United States where the words “first negro epic” would have a powerful emotional impact. Paul Breslin in his pursuit of literary representations of the Haitian revolution excuses Cesaire’s choice of the word epic by saying that he used it “in a colloquial sense.” However, I would like to take Cesaire at his word, as it were, and gauge the impact of the word epic on our reconstruction or “unsilencing” of the Haitian past. |
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| ISSN: | 1894-8421 2387-6743 |