US Occupation and Frankétienne’s Schizophrenic Writing

This article explores the ways in which what I am calling the “schizophrenic writing” of Haitian author Frankétienne constitutes an aesthetic response to the US occupation of Haiti (1915–1934). I argue that the US occupation of Haiti is symptomatic of a shift in the symbolic order from which the Haitian subject is once again excluded as “other.” In H’éros-chimères, Franketienne’s personal trauma—his conception during the rape of his mother—merges with the traumatic structure of Haitian history—from slavery to dictatorships and natural catastrophes. Readable as a bodily inscription and as a textual repetition, the “original” wound(s) initiate(s) Frankétienne’s nonrepresentational writing, which questions Western ideologies by occupying the uninhabitable site of the real. The argument is twofold: first, I address some general questions about the specificity of the US occupation compared to other phenomena such as colonization, military deployment, economic exploitation, and even humanitarian intervention. Second, I investigate the notion of Frankétienne’s schizophrenic writing, which I posit as an attempt to occupy the real. If colonization and subsequent interventions in Haiti confiscated the domain of the symbolic—typically reserved for Western subjects—then occupying the real may become a political gesture of resistance that reveals the unexpected consequences of what was at the time conceived as a “generous intervention.”