Present-ing the Past: The Persistence of the Para-Revolutionary Moment in Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Aube tranquille

In his 1990 work of prose fiction Aube Tranquille, Jean-Claude Fignolé, Haitian author and co-founder of the Spiralist literary ethic-aesthetic, considers the extent to which an unresolved revolutionary Haitian history persists in and troubles the global present. His novel-spiral makes Haiti’s pararevolutionary moment pertinent to an understanding of its contemporary fate through a complex and spatio–temporally destabilizing account of one family’s New World drama. Implicating the spiral form as a narrative model from which to explore the persistence of a traumatic and meaningful past, Fignolé writes away from even the most ostensibly nontraditional literary representations of time’s passage. He exposes the fraught foundations of Haiti’s relationships with Africa, Europe, and the Americas, foregrounding the island republic’s transatlantic and transhistorical dimensions. This essay looks closely at the specific mechanisms by which Fignolé allows the colonial past to resonate in the postcolonial present and considers the author’s profound resistance to authoritative reconstructions of ambivalent American histories.