A Note on Rene Belance

René Bélance was born in 1915 in Corail, Haiti, not far from the coastal town (and homeland of poets) Jérémie. His mother made a meager living by selling candies in the marketplace. After winning a scholarship to the Lycée Pétion of Port-au-Prince, considered the best secondary school in the country, Bélance went on to Haiti’s Ecole Normale. At twenty-five he published a first collection of poetry, Rythme de mon Coeur (1940); this was soon followed by Luminaires (1941) and a war poem in many sections, Pour Célébrer l’Absence (1943). As Bélance later observed, his name was quickly pinned to a party label, quite independently of his own wishes: “I was classified as a surrealist right away because I had published a book [Luminaires] that was difficult to read.”¹ Pour Célébrer l’Absence in particular became the pretext for polemics about difficulty, illogicality, preciosity and the respect due the lay reader. “Mr. Bélance compromises his work, his influence, his mission, by a greater number of awkward flaws than is tolerable in so short a book: useless preciosities, naive and unfortunate obscurities,” complained Roger Dorsinville. “Neither images nor ideas are approached in a simple, direct, intelligible manner. One would be relieved to learn that he calls himself a surrealist and rejects conventional clarity in the name of surrealism.”²

When surrealism (in its European form) came to Haiti, late in 1945, in the persons of André Breton, Aimé Césaire, Wifredo Lam, Michel Leiris, and Alfred Métraux, Bélance was immediately received into their company. Several of Bélance’s poems appear in important left-leaning anthologies of the postwar period, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre³ and Présence Africaine’s Haïti: Poètes noirs.⁴ Some scholars of Caribbean literature have mistakenly attributed to Bélance a Parisian residence, while he was, in fact, pursuing rural education projects in Mexico and Haiti: the misjudgement amounts, perhaps, to disbelief that a homegrown voice could command such poetic authority.⁵

Bélance was, meanwhile, pursuing other projects—projects to which he attributed more importance than to his poetic career. After two years of UNESCO-supported study in Mexico, Bélance returned to Haiti and founded in the north of the island a school which would answer the need for teachers willing to take up the hard basic tasks of rural development: starting elementary schools, spreading literacy and with it the beginnings of economic and political change. (Fittingly, it was work on rural education projects that first brought Bélance and Aimé Césaire together.) In the late 1940s, during the moderate government of Dumarsais Estimé, he served for some years as chief administrator in the section of the ministry of national education concerned with teaching adults to read and write Creole/Kreyòl. The middle and late 1950s were “rough years, but also years of hard work . . . I must admit that at a certain point this double existence—poetry and then teaching—came up short against the necessity of teaching, since in this country the illiteracy rate was then and is now around 85 per cent of the population. I told myself we would have to teach if we were going to have poets.” Two years after “Papa Doc” François Duvalier’s election to the presidency (1957), Bélance was able to leave behind him a distasteful political climate by accepting a teaching post in Puerto Rico. From there he went on to hold a series of university appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington at Walla Walla, Williams College and Brown University, retiring at last (to Haiti) in 1982. In 1987 Bélance was named to the Electoral Commission that was to supervise the first free and open presidential campaign in more than a generation. With the military coup of September 1991, he was forced to go into hiding. He now lives quietly in Port-au-Prince.

Bélance’s selection of...