Abstract
" To speak of Haiti and its literature in a different way is to ask, through the words of its writers, what light the Haitian experience can shed on the French-speaking world today, if not on the world at large. How, starting from a historical fact of the unthinkable order, namely a victorious revolution, led from the end of the 18th century by men and women transplanted from Africa to America and reduced to slavery, a civilization was established, of which literature would be a major element. How, in the impasse that followed this revolution, these dispossessed, displaced, linguistically destabilized men and women never stopped saying or writing a dream of inhabiting, demonstrating that literature often begins where speech becomes impossible. "
Yanick Lahens
