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by Jacques Viau Renaud (Author), Ariel Francisco (Translator)
During the Dominican Revolution of 1965, Jacques Viau Renaud joined the rebel forces in support of ousted president Juan Bosch, fighting against the US backed dictatorship. He was killed in battle at age 23. His poems strive to reconcile the violence between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, insistently referring to his "homeland" as the island as a whole throughout his work. The poems also beat the drum of the coming war, in support of the rebel's he will eventually join, serving the true purpose of a poet: to support his country and his people against oppression and corruption. While some poets flee their homelands in order to continue writing in opposition to those in power, Viau took it a step further and actually joined the fight, which cost him his life. One can almost see the progression of his thought process in the poems, his support of the rebels growing stronger and stronger until writing about it no longer suffices; he felt he needed to do more, and he did.
Dead at age 23, to me he is our Caribbean Keats: wise and talented beyond his years, taken from us too soon. We can only imagine the way his work could have continued to evolve had he lived. What he did write during his lifetime though is incredibly important, especially to those who come from the diaspora caused by the war he fought in. Viau had an incredible awareness of oppression in his neighboring countries as well, with some poems addressing racism here in the United States. For example, a long elegy to Medgar Evers, a civil rights leader assassinated by racists in 1963 that clearly invokes the grand "we" of Walt Whitman. Many of the poems call for solidarity among all of the Latin American nations going through political turmoil (caused or influenced by the United States).
Viau's poems are a call to arms, literally and figuratively, to oppressed peoples across the America's, which resounds incredibly loudly with the state of the world today.
