Of Male Exiles and Female Nations: “Sexual Errancy” in Haitian Immigrant Literature

With up to one-fourth of all Haitian nationals actually living abroad, it is unsurprising that there should be a flourishing “Haitian” literature outside the country. The fact of late-twentieth-century Haitian migration is inseparable from the reign of François and then Jean-Claude Duvalier from 1957 to 1986. In addition to extreme poverty, the Duvalier regimes were marked by brutal political oppression and extreme forms of censorship. To speak out against the government was to risk beating, imprisonment, or murder, and thus writers in particular found themselves the targets of the Tontons Macoutes—the nickname given the Volontaires de la Securité Nationale, the Duvaliers’ own police force.

Rather than in a single mass migration, Haitians left the country in wave after wave, and thus Haitian writers abroad do not fall into one generation. René Depestre, for example, first went into exile in 1946. He studied in France before it, too, expelled him. After traveling to Czechoslovakia and a series of Latin American countries, Depestre spent two decades in Cuba as a committed Communist. His eventual disillusionment with the Party led to his departure once more for France in 1978, where he remains today, an actively writing eighty-five-year-old. Émile Ollivier, fourteen years Depestre’s junior, left Haiti eighteen years after him, in 1964. He, too, studied in Paris, but settled immediately afterwards in Montreal, where he remained until his death in 2002. Also becoming a part of Montreal’s sizeable Haitian immigrant community was Dany Laferrière, born thirteen years after Ollivier, in 1953. A journalist at the time of his departure, he decided to immigrate in 1976 after the murder of a close friend. Although he lived for some time in New York and Miami, Laferrière has since returned to Montreal for good.

While they followed different trajectories at different times, criticism on these three authors has often centered around similar questions of exile.¹ How have these writers experienced their time abroad? What do their texts say about exile? How can we understand the Haitian immigrant in relation both to the host nation and to Haiti? In fact, all three writers resist the label of exile in both their literary work and in interviews or other personal texts. They, and the critics reading them, have questioned the pain associated with that word and the possibilities that it seems to foreclose of new ties being formed. Edward Said, for example, describes exile as “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (159). While the oeuvre of Depestre, Ollivier, and Laferrière are not without a certain nostalgia, such a statement hardly characterizes their experience, either textually or biographically. Depestre, to cite just one instance, insists:

No, I’m not nostalgic for my native country because Jacmel [his hometown] is in me and is part of my imaginary. . . . No doubt it’s because I was never dispossessed of my past that I’ve never experienced sadness in thinking of Haiti. It’s also because, very early on, I integrated the idea that the whole world is my homeland into my reflections, so that I’ve never had that feeling of exile which, since the time of Antiquity, has been associated with a certain asceticism. Quite the contrary, I see exile as a joy, an enrichment.

(Chanda 37, my translation)

Depestre, like his compatriots, focuses on the possibilities that living outside of Haiti affords him, but at the same time avoids alienation from his own past. Exile allows for what Ollivier terms “multiple belongings” (Lettres 7), and in this case Haiti becomes only one belonging among many.

In this sense, I suggest that we might talk about these writers and their work as “errancy” rather than “exile,” to use a concept outlined by Édouard Glissant. Glissant (after the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) associates the native country with the root. The exile is rooted in his or her native culture, which is perceived as monolithic and...