From Francophonie to World Literature in French: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics

5. Writing as Remembering

5 Writing as Remembering Lyonel Trouillot on Love and Haiti A poet, novelist, critic, journalist, and professor of literature, Lyonel Trouillot has published in both French and Creole and lives in his native city of Port-au-Prince, where his activism against political oppression contributed to the departure of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.¹ One of the signatories of the manifesto “Toward a ‘World Literature’ in French,” Trouillot also contributed an essay to Pour une littératuremonde (Le Bris and Rouaud 2007). Commenting on the Étonnants Voyageurs–Haïti festival, which was supposed to take place in January 2010 but was cancelled because of the earthquake, Trouillot points out the wide cultural, social, and aesthetic scope of its program: The themes will broach questions that interest writers and all the living: literary creation and social consciousness; the sometimes unequal reception of works depending on their geographical origin; the connotations of adjectives and complements of nouns sometimes accompanying the substantive “writer”: “woman,” “black,” “Francophone”; littérature-monde viewed as the literatures of the world testifying to the different realities of the world, 130 writing as remembering to the variety of cultures, of collective situations and personal trajectories; the linguistic choices and determinations as part of the games of power, collective heritages and individual destinies . . . In the end, what can writers discuss and what can they share with the public if not the inexhaustible questioning of the social and aesthetic stakes of creation? (2010b) Rather than fetishizing the “salvific virtues” of literature as Chris Bongie has argued in a particularly vigorous diatribe against both Trouillot’s work and the littérature-monde project (2010, 125), Trouillot interrogates the relation between literature and civic action in the line of Édouard Glissant’s own reflection on poetics and politics, which, Glissant declares, are “intimately connected by [their] reference to the world” (quoted in Artières 2007, 77). The contentious debate that opposed Trouillot and Peter Hallward over the politics of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, published in the pages of a 2009 issue of the journal Small Axe, further points to Trouillot’s engagement not only with literature and poetry but also with the immediate history and politics of his country. Following the January 2010 earthquake, Trouillot published a weekly “Chronique de l’après” on the website of the French newspaper Le Point in which he persistently called for the reconstruction of a more egalitarian civil society in Haiti while reporting on the everyday struggles experienced by tragedy-stricken people mourning their dead and trying to emerge from the wreckage of their country. As Trouillot notes in this chronicle, “I, whose job it is to tell stories, am very afraid of those awaiting me. . . . Haiti, even when the announced reconstruction comes, will remain for a long time a country where one of the main activities of the living will consist in counting their dead” (2010a). The magnitude of the catastrophe and the human destitution it has generated can indeed be seen as a challenge to the relevance of literary and artistic expression in a country where several hundred thousand people were killed and an estimated 2 million were left homeless by the earthquake. writing as remembering 131 At the crossroads of individual expression and collective consciousness , Trouillot’s novel L’amour avant que j’oublie (2007a) explores writing as a space of both emotional confession and public engagement in which aesthetic creation and civic action can converge. Various critics have commented on this work as being “less political” and “more intimist” than Trouillot’s previous novels (Bonnet 2008; “Interview de Lyonel Trouillot” 2010). Trouillot, however, contests such views: “Not at all! . . . [This novel] may even be the most political of all. In the sense that politics is after all a question of the organization of the city [la cité] for the purpose of producing happiness and an acceptable condition for all” (“Interview de Lyonel Trouillot” 2010). Trouillot indicated in an earlier interview: “Also it’s probably the most Haitian of my books since it spans the Port-au-Prince of the 1970s, this civil life in which some people can recognize themselves” (quoted in Flamerion 2007). Rather than driving a wedge between poetics and politics, Trouillot intertwines his intimate account of love and desire with a social, political , and ethical reflection on individuals’ relations with one another. In the process the narrator of the novel, himself a writer, questions the role...