With the end of the Haitian Revolution, a community of Haitian poets and musicians composed poems, plays, treatises, and songs to celebrate their newly liberated land. “The Carnival Mirror” newly assembles these writings to make known the value of music in the first years of Haitian sovereignty. Through the study of parodies, Haitian verses sung to French melodies, the project details how early Haitians drew from an indwelling songbook to glorify their leaders, condemn their tyrants, celebrate their genius, and revise their musical inheritance. Four sections provide the first music history of early independent Haiti, a compendium of Haitian musical source material, and a refutation of static histories of genre and Eurocentric understandings of the Enlightenment.