Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Overture to L'Overture

It's better than nothing, I suppose, the sonnet Worsdworth writes to Toussaint, caged and languishing in a Paris prison. But what a condescending little sentiment: "Live, and take comfort." [1]   The architect of both the one successful revolution of the revolutionary period and the first black democratic republic in the history of the world will die in jail, betrayed by the powers he believed in. [2]   Wordsworth's consolation? The wind will remember. Earth, air, and skies are allies. Not to worry, Toussaint, "Thy Friends are exultations, agonies, / And love, and man's unconquerable mind." With friends like these . . .

Notes

1. William Wordsworth, "To Toussaint L'Overture," Selected Poems and Prefaces by William Wordsworth, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965): 174.

2. No student of the Romantics should remain oblivious, as I did for much too long, to C.L.R. James's magnificent The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Overture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Vintage, 1989).

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