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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1377-1380



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A Folio Of Writing From La Revue Indigène (1927-28)
Translation and Commentary

Kevin Meehan and Marie Léticée


Introduction

Originals for these translations are taken from a 1971 Kraus Reprints edition of La Revue Indigène, a monthly Haitian journal that ran through six issues between July, 1927 and February, 1928. Similar projects were taking shape throughout the Caribbean in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and though La Revue Indigène pre-dates all of them (Fabre 30), a fuller analysis might compare the Haitian journal with, among other publications, Lucioles in Martinique, Trinidad and The Beacon in Trinidad, The West Indian Review in Jamaica, and the column "Ideales de una Raza" that appeared in the Cuban daily paper El Diario de la Marina.

Like many of these parallel movements, La Revue Indigène was greeted with some disdain by local elites who dubbed it "The Indigestible Review" (Thoby-Marcelin and Thoby-Marcelin, viii). Published in Port-au-Prince, and appearing under the slogan "Les Arts et La Vie," La Revue Indigène expressed the efforts of a small but committed group of young Haitian writers to develop a self-conscious literary movement that would be simultaneously national, regional, and cosmopolitan. Foremost among the social forces driving this movement was a desire to resist the cultural and political domination of the U.S. Occupation, which had been maintained forcibly in Haiti since 1915. A separate but related issue of cultural independence was the fact that Haitian intellectuals, by their own account, were often viewed as being in thrall to French trends. Dr. Jean Price-Mars, whose folklore study, Ainsi Parla L'Oncle (1928), heavily influenced members of the Revue Indigène group, and who published the last chapter of his famous monograph in the journal, referred to this Francophile tendency as "collective bovaryism" (8). Inspired by Price-Mars's call to revitalize national identity through exploration of the African-derived culture of Haiti's peasant majority, writers experimented with personas, themes, and Kreyòl phrases drawn from Haitian folklore. Along with the turn toward peasant material, the pages of La Revue Indigène manifested an eclectic range of themes and styles including romantic-, symbolist-, and modernist-influenced creative writing, critical essays by Paul Morand and Georges Duhamel, selections from Sufi mystics and Kahil Gibran, and translations of [End Page 1377] poems by Latin American writers Carlos Pellicer and Maples Arce as well as African- American writer Countee Cullen.

Of the translations presented here, we know only the name--Doris--attributed to the author of the prose poem, "Rain [Pluie]." This piece is included in the present folio both for its evocation of Caribbean rainy season weather, which the author treats as a spur to contemplation of archetypal imagery, and because it is the only piece in the entire run of La Revue Indigène to be signed with a woman's name. Carl Brouard (1902-1965) became an editor of Les Griots, one of the Haitian journals that succeeded La Revue Indigène. Throughout the late 1930s, editors of Les Griots, including Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier, rejected the black socialist synthesis of Jacques Roumain and instead advanced an exclusively race-based idea of Haiti's African cultural origins (Dash 6-8). Brouard's poem, "Prayer to Ogoun [Prière à Hogoun]" which is translated below, shows the increasing openness of indigenist writers to vodoun. "Prayer to Ogoun" appears in La Revue Indigène with "Hymn to Erzulie [Hymne à Erzulie]," also written by Brouard. Jacques Roumain (1908-1944), a founding member of La Revue Indigène and Haiti's most renowned writer, is represented here with a new translation of "Noon [Midi]" (see Fowler 260-61 for an earlier version). Like Doris's "Rain," "Noon" focuses on a typical climatic feature of Haitian life, the stifling noontime heat. The poem is studded with local color references to palm trees, orange trees, and tropical insects. Roumain's use of enjambment in the first three lines is...

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