Preface: Essences of the Real

Le paradoxe du parfum, c’est qu’il libère ce qu’il capture.

—Lyonel Trouillot, Le doux parfum des temps à venir

In a conversation with Laurence Garcia for France Inter (a French public radio channel) in May this year, Lyonel Trouillot spoke about his relation to writing and politics, as a writer and teacher living and working in contemporary Haiti.¹ In a voice at once personal and critical, reflective yet poignant, Trouillot offered a picture of his writing conceived as a mode of bearing witness (témoigner) to the protracted suffering and injustice in Haiti—the mal-vivre or malaise that is a pervasive dimension of the everyday lived experience of ordinary people around him. Part of what was so searching in what Trouillot had to say was the way he spoke of the paradoxical relation between the fictive and the real in his writing. Realism and modernism—in his brand of experimental formalism—were not incompatible dimensions of comprehension and literary expression. To the contrary: his fictions, he said, constituted so many “fragments of the real” (fragments du réel), fictive refractions of the all-too-present realities in a country burdened by the present history of the past. The real, Trouillot said, is “sufficient” (le réel, c’est suffisant). Which is not to say that writing should have a merely passive, absorptive relation to reality. Writing to him is a mode of cultural activism. Asked at a certain point by his interlocutor whether in the circumstances of contemporary Haiti he considered himself an optimist or a pessimist (a not irrelevant question), Trouillot responded simply that he would call himself a pessimiste actif, an engaged pessimist. It is a self-description of subtle, revealing paradox.²

The occasion for the conversation on France Inter was the publication of Trouillot’s most recent book, a short, intense poetic work called, enigmatically, Le doux parfum des temps à venir (which might be translated as The Sweet Perfume of Times to Come). It is in many ways a characteristic work; not unlike his narrative fictions, Bicentenaire (2004), for example, or La belle amour humaine (2011), what you have here is a figuration of the real, an alchemical concentration of the real. The poem neither reflects nor redacts reality. It is, rather, its essence. For what Trouillot is asking you to do is not to suspend your apprehension of reality but to intensify it.

Le doux parfum des temps à venir evokes the way memory is awakened by the embodied and paradoxical sense of smell. It is night, and a woman somewhere begins to speak to her daughter, herself now a young woman, in a voice of intimate disclosure. “Femme je suis. / Et ta mère.” (Woman I am. / And your mother.) It is perhaps the first time this mother has really spoken to her daughter. It will certainly be the last. She is dying; by daybreak she expects to be dead. She asks only that her daughter ensure that when she dies her “dead eyes face the sea” (Tu mettras mes yeux morts face à la mer).³ This, in effect, will be her last will and testament. She will recount to her daughter not only the hard truths of her life (the material want, the abuse, the betrayals, the humiliations) but also the truth of her attitude to life. She wants her daughter to see her in all her flawed humanity, to breathe her dissenting woman spirit. Above all, she is not ashamed of who she is, what she has done. She has not loved the angry men who took advantage of her, but she has “loved love” (j’ai aimé l’amour). She has loved her own nakedness (j’ai aimé la nudité de mon corps). She has never been anyone’s servant (je n’ai jamais été la servante d’un seul). This is the dissenting virtue she wants her daughter to see: “a free woman is mistress of her fragrance” (une femme libre est maîtresse de son parfum).⁴ She wants her daughter to promise her that she will contravene every convention that stands in the way...