Meeting with Lyonel Trouillot, master storyteller from Port-au-Prince
Audio 03:44
Lyonel Trouillot, Haitian novelist.
© Bruno Nuttens
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
11 min
Poet, novelist, lyricist, columnist, writer of writing workshops, Lyonel Trouillot is a key figure in Haitian literary life.
He has to his credit a powerful and poetic work, which draws its honey from the tragedies and the great hopes of the small Haitian people.
The writer has just published his new novel, “Antoine des Gommiers”, with Actes Sud editions, in the pages of which legends, lyricism and dramas are interwoven.
Publicity
“
I have always written.
In the little family legend, it is said that I put myself under what we call home "the shed" in the Haitian habitat and that I told imaginary stories to imaginary beings.
I have no recollection of it.
On the other hand, I remember having written things that I took for poems or even tales or other forms of short texts in notebooks, very early, from the age of at least ten years
”, remembers Lyonel Trouillot.
Since the publication of his first novel in 1989, Lyonel Trouillot has quickly established himself as one of Haiti's most important literary voices.
Novelist but also poet, the writer has today a rich work, composed of novels, collections of poetry in French and in Haitian Creole, of chronicles.
In line with the great Haitian literary tradition of which he proclaims himself heir, Trouillot stages, in his prose as in his poems, the painful realities of his country, without exoticism or complacency.
Intellectual long-standing commitment to the citizen movement of resistance against the dictatorship and the refoundation of Haiti, the man is also a columnist in many magazines and host of writing workshops where new generations of Haitian authors are forged.
Despite this overflowing activity, to which must be added the literature courses he provides at the University of Port-au-Prince, Lyonel Trouillot rarely misses his daily walks in the popular districts of the capital.
It is during these morning trips that he draws his inspiration for his novels, always in touch with reality.
“
I have no imagination
, he likes to say.
I am content to bear witness to the ugliness of the world around me
. ”
The taste of writing
Born in Port-au-Prince in 1956, into a family of judges and lawyers, Lyonel Trouillot was not intended for a literary career.
He studied law with the aim of one day being able to follow in the footsteps of his father, president of the bar of the capital.
Along the way, the passion for literature and writing got the better of the bar, even if the person concerned today vehemently defends himself from making a literary career.
“
Literature is not my only entry into the life of society and the world,
” he likes to say.
The taste for writing came in contact with the classics of Haitian literature which abounded in the family library.
The writer remembers a studious adolescence, nourished by readings of novels and poetic collections written by Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stéphen Alexis, René Depestre and Georges Castera, leading authors of the Haitian pantheon.
"
We are fortunate to have, it is true
i, rejoices the novelist,
great texts in the Haitian tradition.
I was lucky to have these texts to read.
When I was young, I wanted to write like Alexis because it seemed to me that he conveyed the complexity of the real.
Roumain is a writer that I really like, but Alexis' realism seems to me to be broader.
And also, he has this way of reconciling and giving to read reality and the perception of reality at the same time, which has always challenged me.
"
If the militant writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, author of
Compère Général Soleil
remains an important ideological landmark in the ardent life of Lyonel Trouillot, the latter also remembers his meeting, at the age of 20, with the immense Haitian poet René Philoctète, who published all his work on behalf of an author and influenced generations of poets.
For the young Trouillot too, it was a decisive meeting, which weighed on his training as a writer in the making, seeking his poetic language and his voice.
Capture moments of the world
Entered literature by publishing poetry in Creole, not by political choice but because "
it came naturally like that
", Lyonel Trouillot is today known above all as a novelist.
Discovered in France in 1998 thanks to the publication by the Actes Sud editions of his novel Rue des Pas-perdus, it fascinates by its torrential language, by its writing art which borrows as much from the verve of the storyteller as from the he economy of the modernist story where the linearity of the plot has given way to thematic scattering, polyphony, heterogeneity and decentring.
His whole art as a novelist consists in “
capturing moments of the world like a wandering camera while standing resolutely in the off-screen
”, as the interested party described it in his theoretical book,
Objective: the other
.
Today, the writer has around twenty novels to his credit, the most successful of which are titled
Thérèse en mille pieces
(2000),
Bicentenaire
(2004),
Yanvalou pour Charlie
(2009), and
La Belle amour humaine
(2011). ).
Worked on the question of the balance of power in a society founded on exclusion and exploitation, the novelist has patiently built, from book to book, a colorful and dense epic, populated by all the voices of Haiti.
These voices drawn from the nude of Haitian life, testify, question, implore, cry out their pain, remember.
Coming from the margins, these desperate but never undone voices, we find them in the pages of
Antoine des Gommiers
, the new novel by Trouillot where the story sails between legends, lyricism and drama.
Figure emerging from the popular Haitian past, Antoine des Gommiers was a diviner, a mystic, a saving oracle, whose legend has survived his disappearance decades ago.
The novel tells the story of two brothers, distant descendants of the eponymous hero, who draw from the memory of this fabulous ancestor the resources to face the torments of everyday life.
“
Antoine des Gommiers really existed,”
says the author
.
He has a reputation well established in the Haitian imagination.
Now, I wanted to revisit this legend to see if we can produce meaning and what Antoine des Gommiers as he was and as he is being reinvented can tell us about the human condition.
The legend of Antoine des Gommiers can be seen from totally different positions.
We can see it as a waste of time, but we can also say to ourselves that to endure this material condition and to remain human despite this material condition and possibly to be able to change it one day we need legends.
"
Divided between the realistic description of an island dancing on the edge of the abyss and poetic evocations, this new novel written by Lyonel Trouillot refines the furrow that the writer has been digging for more than three decades.
Through the allegory of the Pythia des Gommiers that Haitians are trying to resuscitate, the book returns to the identity quest of an entire people, a haunting theme at the heart of the fiction of the master storyteller of Port au Prince.
Antoine des Gommiers
, by Lyonel Trouillot.
Actes Sud, 208 pages, 18 euros.
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