The Affect and Aesthetics of Fear in Évelyne Trouillot’s Novels

The Haitian proverb “pè pa preche de fwa” instructs that fear does not have to strike twice for a lesson to be learned. Yet for the characters in Évelyne Trouillot’s fiction, fear is a recurrent emotion that surfaces time and time again, often before she or he acts in any way. As an affective register, fear is a reminder of a character’s vulnerability, which in turn helps to destabilize the notion of Haitian resilience. The resilience trope is one of the prevailing narratives that emerges in stories of Haitian suffering. While it is often used to produce a hopeful story about the indomitability of the Haitian spirit, the resilience trope also has the effect of denying what is ordinary, mundane, and, ultimately, human. As Edwidge Danticat has put it, “Haitians are very resilient, but it doesn’t mean they can suffer more than other people.”¹ Tracing the aesthetics of fear—how Trouillot describes the emotion and how it figures in her work—establishes it as a productive emotion that arises in response to political predicaments, social tensions, historic moments, and personal traumas. In what follows, I consider fear as affect and aesthetics through examples from four novels: Rosalie l’infâme, L’Œil-totem, Absences sans frontières, and Le Rond-point.² Fear has myriad sources in these novels. It emerges from the terror of slavery causing enslaved people to flee into the forest and become maroons, to provide sexual favors for their masters, to maintain deadly silences, or to kill newborn children as a way to free them from a life of slavery. It is the response of the young child living under occupied Haiti unable to walk freely in her neighborhood. It reflects the torment of an undocumented person who might be subject to deportation at any moment. It is the panic faced by the upper classes during waves of kidnapping as well as the anticipation of hunger for the poor. As these characters experience it, fear is a multilayered, manifold emotion with far-reaching results.

When Lisette, the protagonist of Rosalie l’infâme, unites with her lover she is flooded by emotions that one would not immediately associate with romance. She pours out her entire self into their embrace, her body crumbling under the weight of the emotions. “Tout est dit: les flammes, les cris, la peur, l’angoisse, la honte, l’outrage, la colère et la rage.” (“Everything comes out: the flames, the screams, the fear, the anguish, the shame, the indignation, the anger, and the rage.”)³ Here fear is joined by anguish, shame, outrage, anger, and rage. It is one more emotion in the torrent of feelings that Lisette, a young enslaved woman, battles in her coming-of-age story. At the end of the novel, when Lisette runs fearlessly into the woods to become a maroon and defy a life of enslavement and captivity, we understand that her actions are made possible by a determination to no longer live in fear. Fear motivates her so much so that it leads to fearlessness. Notwithstanding the focus of the novel, in Rosalie l’infâme fear is not the exclusive province of the enslaved as one might expect. During this particular historical period, known as the time of poisoning, the slaveholders in Saint-Domingue also live in fear as those they violently oppress on a daily basis begin a tacit rebellion. The fear inspired by slavery also exists on both sides, albeit of a very different origin, character, and institutional power.

While the basis of these fears is different, the poetics through which they come into view are often similar. Fear registers through the body; it rarely occurs in isolation but is present with other emotions, and it is directly linked to action or inaction. That fear is not only related to political, historic, or sociocultural phenomena is especially noteworthy. It is deeply personal, and often beautifully rendered in Trouillot’s novels. Take for example the characters in Le Rond-point, each of whom comes from a different social...