Les Réalismes haïtiens contemporains: récit et conscience sociale by Peggy Raffy-Hideux (review)

This hugely ambitious and highly accomplished study provides a conceptual overview of, and close critical engagement with, Haitian fiction since the election of François Duvalier in 1957. Before that date, the author contends, Haitian fiction could be divided into two categories: socialist realism and réalisme merveilleux, the former being most closely associated with Jacques Roumain, and the latter with Jacques-Stephen Alexis. Undertaking a diachronic study of three generations of writers — the Duvalier generation (chiefly Jean Métellus and Émile Ollivier), the Duvalierism generation (Lyonel Trouillot and Dany Laferrière), and the Aristide generation (Gary Victor, Kettly Mars) — the author traces the enduring influence of Roumain and Alexis, and the persistence of the ‘real’ as a thematic category that to varying degrees determines changes in literary form across the generations. The real itself is shown to be a malleable, ever-evolving concept: in the earlier works it has much to do with national identity and sociopolitical reality, while in later novels, particularly those that deal with the theme of exile, it relates more directly to individual identity and to the intimate experience of the Haitian subject in varying states of isolation. The book is divided into three parts. The chapters in Part I focus on the three generations and the connections between them in relation to the representation of the real, while Part II ranges more broadly in its diverse investigations into the manifestations of social realism across the same generational shifts. The third part takes up again the theme of réalisme merveilleux, and ranges across largely familiar tropes of the fantastic, the baroque, and the carnivalesque in contemporary writing. Throughout, literary form is analysed in relation to changing political realities. The Duvalier dictatorship is seen as a founding moment of crisis for the modern Haitian novel, in that state censorship limited authorial freedom, and the everyday experience of the dictatorship rendered that reality all the more difficult to represent in writing. A distinctly traditional study in terms of approach, structure, and thematic interest, the book covers a remarkable range of Haitian authors and presents a rich panorama of more than fifty years of writing. It is also distinctive in its almost exclusive engagement with francophone critics such as Jean-Claude Souffrant, Antoine Régis, and Léon-François Hoffmann, and their classic works of Caribbean and Haitian literary scholarship. The long-standing and rapidly expanding corpus of anglophone scholarly work on Haiti is not referenced to any significant degree, and there is, moreover, no attempt to engage with postcolonial theory. The result is an exceptional work that bears many of the attributes of French-speaking Haitianist criticism — including highly skilled close analysis, scrupulous attention to the primary texts, and unyielding critical rigour — and a sense of an ongoing critical chasm between francophone and anglophone Haitianist scholarly traditions.