Spiralist Testifying in Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Aube tranquille: Reading the Victim-Perpetrator Dialectic in Haitian Literature

Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Spiralist novel Aube tranquille (1990) addresses in a unique way trauma theory’s problematics, including the identification of the positions of victim and perpetrator, as well as the hazards of testifying. By using Spiralist esthetics to depict the experience of slavery, the author offers an original reading of the stakes at play in the process of testifying to traumatic events. This article examines how Spiralist literary devices (disordered temporality, absence of punctuation, spatial incoherence) contribute to questioning how the floating identities of the victim and perpetrator impact the testimonial narrative.