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Haiti commemorates, on January 12, the anniversary of the earthquake that devastated the country ten years ago, touching its capital in the heart and killing hundreds of thousands of lives. The writers were the first to testify in their writings of the terror and distress of the survivors of the disaster. Since then, Haitian literary production has been deeply marked by this event and the human and ecological dramas it has aroused. Panorama of Haitian post-seismic literature, between testimonies and romantic reconstruction.
“ In Haiti, the writer is considered a demiurge. He has the magic of words ”, likes to say Bonel Auguste, rising figure of the young generation of Haitian writers. Nothing illustrates the privileged place reserved for literature in this half of the island better than the ovation with cries of " The poet is alive !" The poet is alive ”which resounds when the great Frankétienne , emblematic figure of Haitian cultural life, appeared at the window of his house in Port-au-Prince, a few hours after the tragic earthquake which devastated the country on January 12, 2010 .
The writer's house had been affected, as had most of the dwellings in the popular district of the capital where it is located. The walls were ripped open, the tremors made the supporting pillars tremble, but the house had held out, much to the relief of the writer's neighbors and friends.
Poet, painter, novelist, playwright, " Frankétienne is a metaphor for Port-au-Prince ", " he is one with the city ", wrote his compatriot and the French academician Dany Laferrière . Man maintains an almost mystical relationship with his country. It is said that half an hour before the start of the earthquake, Frankétienne was rehearsing at his home his last play depicting the great disorder of the elements. This play, which has never been performed since, tells of " the planet (which) turns and capsizes in tremors of fear and derailments of terror ", summoning the " Bruised bodies!" Disfigured bodies! Crushed bodies! "Premonitory poem, written by a writer" we can no longer be in symbiosis with the places, his city, his country ", according to his admirers.
Engagement requirements
Octogenarian and nélélisable for several years, Frankétienne never wanted to leave his country, unlike many of his colleagues who left and who make the literary and artistic fame of the Haitian diaspora in Paris, New York or Montreal. " If the Haitian literary profusion owes its visibility to the writers of the diaspora many of whom fled the country to escape the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986), the exiles have, in sharing with those who remained, a long literary tradition more of two centuries, "explains Yves Chemla, specialist in Haitian literature and author of an important manual on contemporary writings in Haiti (1).
The Haitian literary tradition was born the day after independence in 1804 when the old Saint-Domingue seized its independence from France to become the first Black Republic in the world, model for so many countries dominated in all latitudes. The first Haitian writers drew their inspiration from this pioneering history. "Stella d'Emeric Bergeaud, dated 1859, the first proven novel of the Haitian corpus, was a barely romanticized version of the events of the war of independence, " recalls Yves Chemla. Haitian literature has forged its specificity through the vicissitudes of this dramatic story fueled by an unfulfilled quest for freedom, dissent, suffering, exile and murder.
It is a historical fact, the Haitian identity is the product of this bicentennial literature whose great moments were those when the writers vouched for the dignity of the Haitian people, making sense of the flaws of a deeply divided society and unequal. Poets, novelists, playwrights, their names are Justin Lhérisson, Jacques Roumain, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Anthony Phleps, René Philoctète, Frankétienne, René Depestre , Jean-Claude Fignolé, Marie Chauvet… " Their works, whose main subject is Haiti, its excesses and its future, are exemplary of the fundamental challenges represented by Haitian literature. These issues go beyond literary questions in the strict sense , to embrace life, death, the past, the present and the future, ”says Yves Chemla.
It is undoubtedly this imperative of commitment, which traditionally characterizes Haitian literature, which explains that the writers were the first to speak, some as early as January 12, in order to recount the violence of the disaster that occurred there 10 years and its horrors. Often personally affected because of the scale of the phenomenon, they took up their pens in the early hours of the tragedy to witness, communicate and help produce a universe of meaning around the Haitian disaster. Their productions today represent an impressive corpus made up of memories, chronicles, stories and fictions which bear witness to both the strength and the difficulty of literature in the face of such a drama.
" Amazing travelers "
If the writers were among the first to speak after the earthquake, it is also because most of the authors who matter in contemporary Haitian literature were present on the spot at the start of 2010. They had been mobilized by Michel Le Bris to participate in the second Haitian edition of its famous literary festival " Etonnants voyageurs ", which was to take place from 14 to 21 January.
“ The programming of this festival in Haiti also coincided , explains Yves Chemla, with the arrival on the front of the stage of a new generation of writers who had grown up on an island free, since 1986, of the dictatorships of Duvalier father and son and on which the wind of freedom of thought and expression was blowing . The stars of the Haitian literary diaspora and the new talents of local literary life were gathered in Port-au-Prince to delight lovers of the literary thing. They did not imagine that they were going to find themselves at the forefront of a telluric cataclysm that was brewing in the depths of the Caribbean land.
So, when at 12.53 p.m. on January 12, the Pearl of the Antilles exploded consuming its sons, it was quite natural that the writers became the spokespersons for the distress, terror and the irrepressible will to survive of the survivors. " With our dead, with our words, we who have returned from the flood of stone are writing to find a place in the world of the living, " wrote the novelist Lyonel Trouillot in a collective work published in May 2010 (2). A similar ambition drives Everything on the move around me (3) by Dany Laferrière and Failles (4) under the subtle pen of Yannick Lahens. Two books of testimonies, both powerfully evocative, even if they approach their subject very differently, as evidenced by the titles.
Live testimonies
The famous author of L'Énigme du retour (2011) and How to make love with a negro without getting tired (1985), a book which made the future academician of the Quai Conti known, was the guest of honor at the demonstration of Amazing travelers who did not happen. When the earth began to shake on January 12, the writer was seated at the restaurant of his hotel with a close friend. The next second, the two friends were face down in the courtyard. Both of them were seized with terror, fearing that the earth would open to swallow them up, but a writer at heart, Dany Laferrière quickly took out of his pocket his black notebook from which he never separated and began to note everything that crossed his field of vision.
Everything around me was born from this writer's reflex. Despite the extreme tension that presided over its birth, this book aims to be a realistic account of "things seen", without pathos or lyrical effusion. The author recounts the sixty seconds that the first tremors lasted, but also the muffled noises of collapsing buildings and the cloud of dust rising in the afternoon sky. He writes, " I didn't know that sixty seconds could last that long. And that a night could never end . "
Far from being a succession of morbid scenes, the 128 chronicles gathered in this book show the devastation, the distress, but also the vitality of the Haitian people and their solidarity. It also discusses the dynamism of Haitian culture embodied by Frankétienne which Laferrière visited the day after the earthquake. The poet made a point of telling his visitor about his mad run through his house when he felt the floors undulate under his feet from the top of his terrace. The man was still breathless.
Author of Failles , a chronicle, while mastering and restraining, of the cataclysmic aftermath of the earthquake, Yannick Lahens also did not want his role as a writer to be summed up in what she called " macabre accounting ". His text, animated by urgency and compassion, opens with a masterful portrait of Port-au-Prince. His writing, full of emotion and sensitivity, mixing fairy tales, sociology and lyrical nostalgia, grabs the reader by the throat.
Failles is above all a poignant and profound questioning on the Haitian condition. The title, here, has a programmatic value, and immediately announces the path of a thought which, starting from the geological fault at the origin of the earthquake, explores the social, political and economic faults which weigh on the development of the country since its creation in 1804. Taking stock of two centuries of Haitian underdevelopment, Lahens writes: “ Delivered, undressed, naked, Port-au-Prince was not, however, obscene. What was, it was his forced exposure. What was obscene and remains it is the scandal of its poverty. Poverty that has its causes and a history in the world as it goes. "
A renewed fiction
Failles is finally a reflection on writing. “ In the face of misfortune, how do you make literature? Asks Yanick Lahens in the pages of his story. This question has long tapped Haitian writers confronted with the earthquake and its consequences. After the emergency ended, most of them turned to more traditional forms, notably fiction to tell the tragedy. But to live up to the material, it was necessary to revolutionize writing, to acquire new strategies. Critics speak of the revival in Haitian literature, with the emergence of young novelists such as Marvin Victor , Makenzy Orcel or James Noël, who in recent years have delivered some of the most innovative stories " gathered around the fault" ", To use the expression used by the Haitian intellectual Joël des Rosières.
" Corps mixed (5) by Marvin Victor is without doubt the greatest novel of the earthquake, " proclaims Yves Chemla, attentive observer of the literary evolution of the island. First opus under the pen of a talented thirty-something, this novel depicts a bereaved mother whose inner monologues marked by unreason painted the beauty of a world that never ceases to be reborn from its rubble. Wandering between the rubble of her life and those of the city that buried her only daughter, the protagonist Ursula Fanon recalls the stages of her existence whose evocation schrizophene still retains her among the living.
Marvin Victor shares his taste for a syncopated and beautifully inventive language with his friends James Noël and Mackenzy Orcel, authors of Belle Marvel (6) and Immortelles (7) respectively. This latest novel is a tribute to the prostitutes who disappeared in the earthquake.
The panorama of post-earthquake literary production would be incomplete without mention of the outstanding works of the generation established on the earthquake. There are at least three that are worth noting. Let's start with Kettly Mars' At the Frontiers of Thirst (8). The latter is a veteran of Haitian literary staff, with eight novels to her credit, but also collections of short stories and poems. His novel takes place in a refugee camp, which has become a symbol of the bankruptcy of the international community and the excesses of Haiti after the earthquake. A sort of "inferno" à la Dante in which the main character sinks, victim of his ambiguities and his impulses. The strength of the novelist consists in having been able to trace in a coherent and convincing way the hero's path of redemption through writing, here erected as the main force of resistance in a degraded society.
It is also a degraded society that we are dealing with, racialized and consumed by conflicts, in Louisade Philippe Dalembert's Ballade d'Amour . Author of a masterful work divided between poetry and prose, Dalembert often camped his stories far from his native Haiti. But the country before is still implicit in his books, as in this beautiful novel of exile and martyred childhood that he published two years after the last Haitian cataclysm. However, the earthquake at the heart of this novel is the one that shook the villages of the Abruzzo region in Italy in 2009, but the tremors send back the central character, Azaka, to his childhood in Haiti where at the age of ten , he was buried under the rubble of the city after a devastating earthquake.
Built in resonances between the past and the present, between here and there, Ballade d'un amour unfinished is a poignant and poetic novel that transcends the violent and murderous geological event. It is dedicated " to my family in Abruzzo and that of Port-au-Prince. To the survivors from here and there, who will have to learn to live for those who have left . ”
Guillaume et Nathalie (10) is the third essential novel in post-seismic literary production. It is a sumptuous tale of love and resistance written by Yanick Lahens, to whom we also owe Failles , his book of memories gathering impressions and reflections on the 2010 earthquake.
Coming to literature late, Yanick Lahens is the author of a rich work, marked by an exceptional literary and poetic intelligence. This intelligence is at work in Failles , but also in the novel Guillaume and Nathalie which cannot be read separately because one refers to the other from the first pages. These intertextual references make sense, the reflections of the essayist coming to illuminate the actions that lead to the flowering of the passionate love story between the two protagonists of the novel.
“ We were in December 2009 , recalls the novelist. On January 12, 2010, at 4:53 p.m., in a twilight that was already looking for its end and beginning colors, Port-au-Prince was ridden for less than forty seconds by one of these gods who are said to feed on of flesh and blood. Riding wildly before collapsing shaggy hair, rolled eyes, dislocated legs, gaping sex, showing off his entrails of scrap metal and dust, his viscera and his blood. "
The novel ends where the essay begins, recalling the impermanence and fragility of life. Guillaume and Nathalie did not see the tragedy coming. Love did not save Haiti!
(1) Haitian literature 1980-2015 , by Yves Chemla. Delmas, C3 éditions, 2015, 314 pp.
(2) Haiti among the living , collective work. Literature of the emergency and testimonies of writers gathered after the earthquake by the editorial staff of Le Point and by Lyonel Trouillot. Ed. Actes Sud / Le Point, 2010, 182 p.
(3) Everything is moving around me , by Dany Laferrière. Ed. Grasset, 2011, 179 p.
(4) Failles , by Yanick Lahens. Ed. Sabine Wespieser, 2010, 158 p.
(5) Mixed bodies , by Marvin Victor. Ed. Gallimard, 2011, 249 p.
(6) Beautiful wonder , by James Noël. Ed. Zulma, 2017, 150 p.
(7) The Immortals , by Makenzy Orcel. Ed. Zulma 2012, 134 p.
(8) On the borders of thirst , by Kettly Mars. Ed. Mercure de France, 2013, 160 p.
(9) Ballad of an unfinished love , by Louis-Philippes Dalembert. Ed. Mercure de France, 2013, 283 p.
(10) Guillaume and Nathalie , by Yannick Lahens. Ed. Sabine Wespieser, 2013.151 p.