A Beautiful Agony: Visionaries and Freedom Fighters in Haitian History

By Joseph P. Policape

This is a book that unfolds the history of the world’s first black republic through the art of poetry. Yes, the first black republic on Earth started in the Americas! Beautiful Agony is a collection of poetic snapshots of the heroes and heroines who made Haiti possible as a nation and trekked the eternal struggle to keep Haiti’s freedom soul. Do you love poetry? Do you love wordplay? Do you love sophisticated prose? Then Beautiful Agony: Visionaries and Freedom Fighters in Haitian History is for you. These poems serve a double mission: personal pleasure and historical recognition of people and a land and the impressive odds against its existence and the triumphant glow of its survival. When Haiti came into existence, the fight was an extremely difficult one, and Haiti’s enemies were the world’s greatest powers at that time. The improbable but hard-won victory of the slaves against France’s powerful Napoleon and his cohorts was an extraordinary achievement for my little island. This book is for everyone who loves freedom, whether poet lovers, teachers, social workers, ministers, scholars, activists, lawyers, politicians, musicians, psychologists, youth, or parents. It will give you hope that nothing is impossible after witnessing the experience of the improbable hunger and spirit of those who were forced into existence a new nation of former slaves and free blacks. Beautiful Agony is a testament to the creative will and humanity of Haiti’s freedom and agony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664187108

Joseph P. Policape

If life or someone has discouraged you, this book will revitalize you. Poet, writer, thinker, and citizen, Dr. Joseph P. Policape was born in Haiti. He moved to the United States in the early eighties. His higher education took place in Massachusetts whereby he focused on Mental Health and Christian Psychology. Writing short story collections, a short story book has always been in the mind of the author Joseph P. Policape.

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Joseph P. Policape.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/27/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

832377

CONTENTS

Preface

Section I: The Whole World is Watching

General Toussaint Louverture

General François Capois

The Battle of Vertières

François Makandal

A Genuine Hero

Florvil Gelan Hippolyte

Marie Claire Heureuse B. F. Dessalines

Catherine Flon

Boukman

Jean-Jacques Dessalines

General Henry Christophe

Section II: My Name is Freedom

Jean-Pierre Boyer

Jean-Jacques Acaau and the Farmers in 1844

General Sabès Alexandre Pétion

Joseph-Anténor Firmin

Emperor Faustin Soulouque

The Man with the Magical Charms

Section III: Nurturers of Liberty

The Poet We Forever Love

The Unstoppable Fighter

Heaven is Brought Tears

Rosary Is My Only Weapon

Our Ideal Hero

Jean Fouchard, My Hero

Mildred Trouillot Aristide

Jacques Roumain

Jean Dominique, Thank You!

Section IV: Love is the Name of Agony

Ode to Dumarsais Estimé

Father Parizo

The Creole Prince

Haiti, the Beloved of the Caribbean

Leaving One’s Country

Léopold Morning Sédar Senghor

Aimé Fernand David Césaire

That Piece of Land

Section V: The Human Face of Repression

My Soul Shall Hear of Their Tears

Ode to My Hero

Simone Ovide Duvalier

Two Hundred Years of Abuse

Like Judas Inside a Veil

The Four Winds on My Island

The East Wind

The Conservative Haitians

The United States Invasion of Haiti

When Papa Doc Reigned

Vatican toward Haiti

Queen COVID-19

Section VI: Spirits

Sister Zombie Passing By

When She’s Possessed with the Lwa

My Family’s Crave for Voodoo

Kase-Kanari

The Martyr of a True Leader: President Jovenel Moise

Timeline of Haitian History

References

I would like to thank my two children, Elishah J. Policape and Eva Rebecca J. Luxe, for always being there for me when I needed them the most. I would like to thank my brother Louis Polycarpe, who always encourages and supports me whichever way he can and is a sincere and true brother; my friend Russell Larking, who never stops giving me good advice; Anne Beauregard, who is always willing to edit my work and give me suggestions; and my cousin Pierre Lesperance, who is always making sure that I am okay each day. Thank you to Brother Jocelyn Joseph and his family for always being there for me. I would also like to thank my publisher, who accepts to publish this book and distribute it to the world to inform them of our beautiful and dear Republic of Haiti.

Preface

The Haitian Revolution was a seismic shift in the universe on planet Earth. Never before in human history had a marginal but powerful group of slaves gain their liberty through victorious war. And it was a victory for the color black since it challenged the fundamental premise for black slavery at the time: a white superiority rationale.

Posterity was to record the Haitian blacks and other New World blacks as the original builders of the economic and material foundations of the Americas; however, the slaves and free blacks in Haiti did something special and universal in the wake of that brutal, systematic oppression: they fought and won their independence and freedom from France on January 1, 1804, and extended the ideals of the European Enlightenment and American Revolution.

The beautiful agony was the ambiguity of freedom after these relentless and dreamy revolutionaries fought with such passion, ferocity, and strategic intelligence to claim Haitian soil as autonomous, free space for the downtrodden of the world. These poems trace the existential and cultural trajectory of what it meant to forge a liberty in the dominate fires of the Western world, Napoleon’s France in particular, and the systematic repression against this little black island! A set of powerful enemies stood brutal and erect against the Haitian experiment of liberty from the beginning of independence and throughout Haiti’s history, including our contemporary experience today.

The fifty poems that make up this first collection are homage to the Haitian people and their heroes and heroines. The passionate intensity that defined our revolution was unprecedented and a lonely and isolated journey too because allies were stingy in their existential and material support; the nineteenth-century Haitian slaves in the end had only themselves in war and freedom. The New World was astonished that these slaves who became citizens created the second independent republic here next to the first one, the United States. The Old World with Goliath certainly felt that these slaves were no match to the military might and assumed superiority of their rulers, that it was only a matter of time before