Roundtable: Writing, History, and Revolution

J. MICHAEL DASH: I want to welcome our four Haitian authors—Louis-Philippe Dalembert, Edwidge Danticat, Dany Laferrière, and Évelyne Trouillot. I have asked them to think about the impact of the Haitian Revolution on their work. I want to ask Dany first: has the revolution had an influence on you and how has it shaped your sensibility?

DANY LAFERRIèRE: Yes, the revolution shaped my entire outlook, because I belong to the generation that studied Haitian literature and history at school. I imagine the preceding generations had studied history as well but we studied Haitian literature, and literature in Haiti is completely tied to history, especially in the early postrevolution period, and even before that. I remember how moved I was reading one of the first poets, Antoine Dupré,¹ who wrote about the heroic era, who surely knew those who had taken part in the struggle, those who had taken up arms in the war of independence. There were also warriors who wrote, such as the famous Boisrond Tonnerre,² who drew up the Declaration of Independence, a writer who is said to have coined a commonly used verb but which is yet to be admitted into French dictionaries: lugubrer, which means "to darken." So, all of this shaped my sensibility. There was a period in Haitian literature when authors felt the need to make a slight break from historical narration and move towards a kind of writing that described the Haitian space, the Haitian landscape, and brought some "color" to Haitian literature.

It was necessary for Haitian authors to take a look at themselves because there was a strange situation in that behind all this historical literature, there was a backdrop of Romantic and French literature. There was Jules Solime Milscent,³ who wrote a lot at the time on the reading of La Fontaine.⁴ There was a strong sense of nationalism, perhaps not quite nationalism, but there were these men of war who, in spite of everything, drew their aesthetic sensibility from France. The landscape they were describing could at times be superimposed onto a European landscape, even if the patriotic feeling was uniquely Haitian. There was the school of 1836 with the Nau brothers,⁵ Ignace, Émile, the Ardouin brothers,⁶ Corolian, Céligny, Beaubrun, the L'Espinasse brothers;⁷ a literature of brothers! And it is incredible: all these brothers who lived in the same neighborhood, wanted to see the landscape, to look at it, describe it and reinscribe history into national landscape. At all costs the palm tree had to be described, over and again. This literature continued to seize upon a discourse; it created a more civilian, less warlike discourse, and curiously it was a social discourse, the discourse of those who had nothing. Right after the war of independence, when Haitian society came into being, the two big political parties had already categorically drawn their boundaries. There was the national party and the liberal party, and their very mottos signaled a face-off, a confrontation that we still see today. The national party's motto was "power to the greatest number"; the liberal's was "power to the most capable." The confrontation continues, I believe, even today.

So literature was politics, social politics that revisits nineteenth-century discourse with the Marcelins,⁸ the Hibberts,⁹ the social critics. There was the description of politics and social mores in Marcelin's work, irony and parody with Lhérisson,¹⁰ who wanted to shake things up, as it were. As a devoted reader, you can imagine how the sensibility of a young writer was able to absorb all that he had heard and read. It was not at all a very scientific discourse, and alongside it there was another kind of literature that sought to situate the historical sensibility on...