René Depestre, between poetry and revolution
Audio 03:39
René Depestre, in February 2017, in Lésignan-Corbières.
© CC-BY-SA-4.0 Etienne Rouziès
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
11 mins
We know René Depestre poet, essayist, novelist, Renaudot Prize 1988 for his novel
Hadriana in all my dreams.
Coming to literature through poetry, the man was also a political activist, traveling companion of the Castro brothers and Che Guevara.
The diary of his Cuban years, found in an archival collection by researchers, sheds light on the commitment and ideological loyalties of this major writer from the French-speaking world.
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Born in 1926, in the city of Jacmel, in Haiti and installed in the south of France since the 1980s, René Depestre is the dean of Haitian letters. From the depths of his "
happy
"
exile
in the
French
hinterland
, the poet never ceases to recall his attachment to his native land and what he owes to Haiti so far away and still so close. “
Once a week, Papa would wake us up to take us to see the sunrise over the Gulf of Jacmel. It was the early morning cinema that I would later transfer to the sexual level by presenting the act of love as an eminently solar act.
"
Jacmel, its gulf and its magical mornings are at the origin of René Depestre's exceptional work. It is a prolific and diverse work, composed of narrative prose, poems, essays and numerous columns in French and Haitian newspapers. At the age of 94, their author laments that he does not have enough time in front of him to be able to edit and publish all the manuscripts that are gathering dust in his drawers.
It is indeed in an archive collection that academics Serge and Marie Bourjea, specialists in the master's work, discovered the manuscript of the diary that the writer kept between 1964 and 1978, while he was living in Cuba.
Legend has it that René Depestre had completely obscured him from his mind.
Published this fall under the title
Cahier d'un art de vivre,
the work brings together notes, portraits, analyzes, personal stories, critiques of the stammering Cuban revolution of which the writer was a key witness for almost two decades. .
He was also a passionate actor.
All fire all flames
René Depestre was 33 when he landed in Cuba via Haiti where he had hoped to settle after long wanderings through Europe and Latin America. Placed under house arrest in Port-au-Prince because of his communist sympathies, he listened in the secrecy of his room to Radio Rebelde, the Castro brothers' guerrilla station entrenched in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra. He dreamed of joining these young people who, not far from the northwest coast of Haiti, fought and aspired to ignite the whole of the Latin American powder keg.
The dream came true in March 1959, when the young Depestre was able to fly to Havana very officially, having been invited by the companion of the Castro brothers, Che Guevara in person. The latter had heard from the article that the writer had published in the Haitian newspaper
Le Nouvelliste
, hailing the triumph of the Cuban guerrillas and insisting on the Latin American significance of the event. Che had liked the article and wanted to meet its author. “
I received a message from the poet Nicolas Guillen,
remembers Depestre.
He told me that Commander Che Guevara wanted to receive me. So I was able to leave Haiti. Che was waiting for me at Havana airport with his escort. Afterwards, he took me to his home. We had an interview that lasted six hours. We talked about everything, literature, the revolution. He put Castro's plan for a revolution before my eyes. And then, we talked about Nazim Hikmet, Paul Éluard, Pablo Neruda, the great poets. The man in front of me was very complex and very complete.
"
Guevara will become the friend and mentor of the young Haitian all fired up, and he will encourage him to stay in Cuba and get involved in the Castro movement. This is what Depestre will do, by participating with enthusiasm in the revolution on the military level, but also on the political and cultural level, before distancing himself from the regime after the death of Che in 1967. Became suspect in the eyes of the regime because of his stance in favor of the freedom to think and write, he was forced to leave the island for good in 1978.
In the diary he kept between 1964 and 1978, with two interruptions in the middle, Depestre recounted in detail his various activities in the service of the Cuban revolutionary power which led him through the communist world, in Asia and in Europe. . He worked as a journalist in the Cuban official press and as a literary advisor to National Editions.
In the pages of Depestre's book, there is also a lot of talk about intimate life, the joy of living and the act of love as a dazzling body. "
Kissing is always much more than kissing when you make love to your body, dazzled
", writes the militant poet. An affirmation which is reminiscent of the role of love and of women in the works of this author, imprinted with what he called his “
solar eroticism
”. "
I have a solar vision of women, a solar vision of the act of love itself,"
explains René Depestre.
To have solar vision is to conceive of love as a party, not as a sport.
It is a double feast for the man and the woman.
This is love in my eyes.
I am not a Casanova, nor a Don Juan, nor a disciple of Sade.
I do not separate love from the joy of living.
"
Disgrace
From the 1970s, a change of tone in the
Cahier d'un art de vivre.
From now on, the entries in the poet's diary are breathless, testifying to the urgency of the writer's questions on the Stalinist excesses of the Cuban regime. At the end of the 1970s, when the affair of the poet Heberto Padilla broke out, Depestre took a public stand in favor of the critical role of intellectuals and artists in the revolution. The reaction of power will not be long in coming. Havana withdraws his passport, before relegating the Haitian revolutionary to a fictitious post of professor without a chair. This is called disgrace. Depestre left the country on January 7, 1978 in circumstances worthy of an adventure novel to reach Paris where a consultant's post awaited him at Unesco, then headed by his friend, the Senegalese Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow.
What makes the value of these notebooks at the origin of the new book of the poet, it is the ethical hygiene of the revolutionary which underlies them. Their author is inhabited by a deep feeling of loyalty towards his fellow travelers despite the cowardice and disenchantment, as he asserts in his entry of March 16, 1978. “
Whatever happens to me - even the worst - I do not I will never be a detached, ironic or bad faith witness to what I have had the privilege of pushing in this island of my heart. Everything that has been preserved in me from childhood will always be on the lookout to prevent me from being unjust or ungrateful to the Cuban revolution.
"
It is all the more difficult for René Depestre to be unjust or ungrateful because, as the chronology of his work reveals, this companionship of revolutionaries was for him the real trigger of his own intellectual revolution and the starting point of his mature work, halfway between fiction and poetry, celebration and criticism, magical realism and realism itself. The Cuban experience gave a new impetus to the literary production of the writer whose work has gained in thickness and depth, "
making René Depestre pass from his state of chrysalis to that of a true creator
", write in their beautiful preface the editors of the
Cahier d'un art de vivre.
It is undoubtedly because he knew how to transform the failure of his militant commitment into a triumph for poetry, that the alchemist of Jacmel can hope that his memory among men will perhaps one day "
have something to do with it. with the fate of the stars
”.
Notebook of an art of living. Cuba 1964-1978
.
Edition established, prefaced and annotated by Serge and Marie Marie Bourjea.
Actes Sud, 320 pages, 27 euros.
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