Lectures on Haitian literature
To speak of Haiti and its literature in a different way throughout the lectures is to ask, through its literature, what light can the Haitian experience shed on the French-speaking world today, if not on the world at large? How, in the impasse that followed independence, did dispossessed, displaced and linguistically destabilized men and women create a civilization of which literature would be a major component? How men and women writers have never ceased to express or write a dream of living, demonstrating that literature often begins where speech becomes impossible. Where the world is so shaken that language must be crossed to find the shards of meaning.
From 1804 onwards, those who had no choice but to inhabit these 27,750 km2, barely larger than some of France's départements, were summoned to invent themselves and to invent in this unknown, unimagined, unwanted place. For two centuries, writers have responded to this summons by nurturing a dream of inhabiting a body that is no longer that of the naked migrant, in Glissant's beautiful phrase, a founding place and time, of inhabiting writing as a primary, original place, a place not of simple rootedness but of possible sojourn, and finally a place beyond ethnicity or class, as vast as silence or the unknown.
And now that Haitian literature is written in three languages other than French, it bears witness to the fact that languages are destined to cohabit, that they cannot have a single flag or a single homeland, and prefigures a twenty-first-century culture in the making.
StudyingHaitian literature in the light of its history allows us to give the qualifier "francophone" a meaning beyond any Eurocentricism. A meaning that suits our time, the only one likely to ensure its future.