Choukoun

by Vanessa Archer

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Price

$200

Dimensions

16.000 x 20.000 inches

Title

Choukoun

Artist

Vanessa Archer

Medium

Painting - Gouache On Canvas

Description

"Choucoune" (Haitian Creole: Choukoun), was the nickname of a Haitian woman in a lyrical passage that praises her beauty. The poem "Choucoune" is in Haitian Creole from 1883 by the famous writer Oswald Durand. The poem describes a beautiful and sensual black woman but not acquired, liberated, thus a "femme fatale". While imprisoned, it tells the story of a disappointment in love between him and her "his most precious conquest".

The Choucoune of Oswald Durand is a fantasy; first he describes her attractive physique and then he puts her in a paradisiacal context. Choucoune will remain for Oswald Durand a haunting and a muse!

After its publication in 1886 in his collection Rires et pleurs, the poem was adapted into a song by the Haitian-American composer Michel Moleart Monton and it will be a great success. This song was entirely rewritten in English under the name "Yellow Bird" in 1957.

In the 1940s, other foreign artists followed suit with their own adaptations of Oswald Durand's poem. This was the case of the American composer Norman Luboff and the Cuban singer Celia Cruz.

During the Indigenist period, many Haitian artists and writers reappropriated the poem to make it a symbol of the struggle for the affirmation of Haitian identity. In a patriarchal era, Choucoune would have transcended her era to embody a feminist, liberated and unattached woman!
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Read more @: Ferolus, G. (2022, November 8). Analysis of the poem Choucoune. Haiti Inter. https://www.haitiinter.com/analyse-du-poeme-choucoune/

Uploaded

January 19th, 2023

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