LITERARY PRODUCTION IN HAITI (original) (raw)
The Haitian language: defying odds and opening possibilities
By examining the question of language in Haiti, this article aims at broadening the debate and dialogue among language policymakers and language rights advocates, scholars, researchers and educators about the effects of " linguistic imperialism " (Phillipson 1992) on the development of Haitian Creole and its impact on Haitian children's educational experience.) has helped shape the scope of this analysis, while also garnering various critical insights from the field of oral literature. In sum, this work reflects an interdisciplinary effort that highlights the impact of linguistic and cultural agents and historical events as it also sheds light on the lived experiences of Haitians within the larger Haitian democratic project begun in 1791
Beyond translation into chaos: exploring language movement in the French Caribbean
Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 2021
As Edwin Gentzler’s latest book (2001) reveals, translation studies (as opposed to translating) is an area that is becoming increasingly relevant to both cultural and literary studies. Developing this point further, Sherry Simon states that, “Increasingly, translation and writing have become a particularly strong form of writing at a time when national cultures have themselves become diverse, inhabited by plurality”(Simon 1999: 72). Or indeed how “Symbolically, translation comes to be the very representation of the play of equivalence and difference in cultural interchange: translation permits communication without eliminating the grounds of specificity” (Simon 1992: 159). Therefore, particularly in postcolonial contexts, where the balance of power hinges on questions of language possession and linguistic insecurities, translation allows this power to be repositioned: it can establish a form of plurality by refusing to allow one language to dominate another. In recent works explorin...
From November 1905 to June 1906, Haiti’s French-literate reading public followed the trials and travails of the West African-born slave turned maroon turned revolutionary leader Jean —“Acouba” in his native language— in Massillon Coicou’s serial “La Noire“. Published in the Port-au-Prince daily Le Soir, the serial included over the eight months 165 installments and recounted the commencement of Haiti’s revolution. The feuilleton begins in the late 1780s and follows an allegorical cast of characters —slaves, free people of color, and planters— during the first years of the Revolution. Coicou’s inclusive cast provides him the opportunity to narrate the Revolution from multiple perspectives and illustrate the complex web of alliances and rivalries in revolutionary Saint-Domingue. Unfortunately, he never finished “La Noire”. The final known installment leaves the reader and main character Jean in the middle of revolutionary upheaval in late 1792/early 1793 after the arrival of the second civil commission from France. Despite the unfinished nature of the story, it is an exceptional text in Haiti’s literary canon and one of the earliest Haitian fictional treatments of slavery, yet has received no scholarly analysis. This chapter begins to address this silence by focusing on Coicou’s theory of Creole genesis described in “La Noire”. Beginning with scenes of storytelling among the slaves, Coicou recounted the linguistic encounters between slaves and masters and the process of creating Haitian Creole. For Coicou, these encounters were part of the larger process of cultural exchange occurring between French planters and West/Central African slaves, which he referred to as “creolization”. His imaginative ethnographic forays offer one of the first discussions of Creole genesis by a Haitian intellectual. I read these selections alongside late-nineteenth-century Creole studies to contextualize Coicou’s fictional investigations. Similar to the early creolists, Coicou’s use of Creole sought to legitimate the language and Haiti’s African heritage. Building upon earlier proverb collections by Haitian intellectuals, Coicou’s feuilleton initiates a radical departure from the general silence on Haitian Creole in Haitian publications. Moreover, Coicou’s interpretation of Creole genesis contributes to his narrative of the Haitian Revolution. In contrast to proponents of the “mulatto legend”, earlier Haitian authors who privileged the role of mixed-race leaders of the Revolution, and late-nineteenth-century revisionists who stressed the role of black creoles, Coicou chose a protagonist who was African-born but also had a command of French. According to Coicou, the slave Jean represented an ideal balance between Haiti’s two main cultural influences in the 18th century—West/Central Africa and France. Coicou’s inclusion of linguistic encounters on the plantation further illustrates this cultural métissage and validates Haiti’s hybrid cultural heritage.
Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature, INTRODUCTION
Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature, 2024
This is the first book to study how Haitian authors-from independence in 1804 to the modern Haitian diaspora-have adapted Greco-Roman material and harnessed it to Haiti's legacy as the world's first anti-colonial nation-state. In nine chronologically organized chapters built around individual Haitian authors, Hawkins takes readers on a journey through one strand of Haitian literary history that draws on material from ancient Greece and Rome. This cross-disciplinary exploration is composed in a way that invites all readers to discover a rich and exciting cultural exchange that foregrounds the variety of ways that Haitian authors have 'hacked classical forms' as part of their creative process.
Haitian Literature and the Dominican Republic
Cambridge History of Haitian Literature, 2024
On November 18, 1937, celebrated Haitian writer Jacques Roumain published an essay in the popular French magazine Regards titled "La Tragédie haïtienne," in which he denounced the massacre Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo had ordered a month earlier against Haitians and Afro-Dominicans. With this essay, Roumain, a staunch opponent of the US Occupation of Haiti and founder of the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, set the tone for generations of Haitian writers and intellectuals who addressed the genocide well into the 1980s. These intellectuals consistently examined the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic through the lens of class struggle, calling out the complicity of the two nations' respective ruling elites and presidents, and the permanent presence of external and internal capitalist forces that have imposed their agendas on both nations. This chapter examines the works of Haitian authors who have written about the Dominican Republic and its relationship with Haiti from the 1937 massacre to 2013, when the Dominican Constitutional Court issued ruling 168-13, also known as La Sentencia, denationalizing thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Numerous Haitian intellectuals have examined the historical relations between both countries, including Jean Price-Mars, Gérard Pierre-Charles, Suzy Castor, Guy Alexandre, and Jean-Marie Théodat, among others. 1 Writers and scholars such as Anthony Lespès, Jacques Parts of this chapter appear in my recently published book Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). I'm thankful for the feedback of Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken and her students at City College, with whom we workshopped this chapter. Thanks, also, to
Occupying Creole: The Crisis of language under the US Occupation of Haiti
At the start of the twentieth century a movement began to dismantle Haiti’s linguistic hierarchy. Haitian writers started using Creole in their works of literature in order to contest the notion that Creole was unfit for written and formal contexts. Such a linguistic revolution would allow Haiti’s monolingual masses to participate in public life. The emergent Creole movement, however, came to an abrupt end with the onset of the US Occupation in 1915. Haitian intellectuals opted to cling to their French cultural heritage as a way of contesting the validity of the Americans’ ‘civilizing mission.’ The Creole project was shelved. Curiously, the Americans had their own reasons for expanding the use of Creole, and contributed greatly to the infrastructure of the language. The Americans, however, provoked widespread opposition and undermined their own work on the Creole question. The cause of language legitimation, much like Haitian democracy itself, ultimately regressed under the Occupation.
Translating the Francophone Caribbean: Centering Black Production, Decentering Translation Practices
2023
In her article, "A Tree as a Record: On Translating Mahagony by Edouard Glissant," translator Betsy Wing recounts how Martinican writer Edouard Glissant expressed his disinclination to respond to translators' questions and justified his intention by saying, "I wrote it once, now it's your turn to write it" (124). According to Glissant, translating and writing are similar in nature. The art of translation therefore does not lie in the process of translating words into another language but in the skill to compose a text anew, that is to say to develop unique ways of 'writing' and therefore to deconstruct the idea of translation as a simple act of transferal. As such, this article considers various translators who have 'written' Caribbean texts anew. It will specifically look at three works from Black French-speaking Caribbean authors which were all translated into English, namely Patrick Chamoiseau, L'esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997) translated by Linda Coverdale as Slave Old Man (2019); Gisèle Pineau's La Grande drive des esprits (1993) translated by J. Michael Dash as The Drifting of Spritis (1999); and Yanick Lahens's Tante Résia et les Dieux (1994) translated by Betty Wilson as Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories (2010). Comparing these translations side by side offers several points of interest: First, it places the race and gender of the author at the core of the translation. Chamoiseau, a Black Martinican man, was translated by Coverdale, a white woman from the United States; Lahens, a Black Haitian woman, by Wilson, a Black Jamaican woman; Pineau, a Black Guadeloupean woman, by Dash, a Trinidadian man. How does the race, gender, or ethnic background of the translator influence the process of translating Black-authored texts? In what ways does it affect the translation of Black experiences? Secondly, we examine various approaches to translating Caribbean creoles into English. For example, Coverdale deliberately keeps the Martinican French in her translation to emphasize the musicality of the text and the voice of the author over transparency and understanding. Similarly to Coverdale, Wilson's translation preserves the Haitian Creole, which bears traces of orality, while also indicating filiations between Haitian Creole and creoles spoken in the Anglophone Caribbean in footnotes. Dash, on the other hand, elects to substitute one creole with another, the Guadeloupean with the Jamaican, allowing the text "to shove the reader around, to [to make them] feel unbalanced" (Dash, 30:09). If the approaches diverge between the translators, each of them views translation as a way to render a foreign text accessible, while simultaneously unsettling the reader's world. Overall, this comparative analysis of the translations of Black authors from the Francophone Caribbean seeks to highlight a plurality of translation approaches centering Black cultural production while destabilizing the idea of a uniform translation practice.
Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954, 2020
On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, general of the Armée Indigène, proclaimed the independent state of Haiti, marking the triumphant end to thirteen years of revolutionary fighting and over three centuries of colonial rule. The year 1804 also marked the end of the redemptive possibilities of a utopian revolution and the beginning of the fraught project of postcolonial, antislavery statehood. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the challenges that Atlantic world powers posed to Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy during the Age of Revolution, but there existed an equally important internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between those who envisioned an anticolonial, antislavery empire and those who wished to establish a liberal republic. Yet this post-1804 context of empire and civil war remains shrouded, silenced in scholarship on Haiti. Haiti’s Paper War examines the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers. In her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence, the author composes a new literary history of Haiti that challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial. By examining internal dissent during the revolution, the author reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume—the paper war— that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti. In the introduction, the author presents a reading of postindependence Haitian writing that reveals key insights into the nature of literature, its relation to freedom and politics, and how fraught and politically loaded the concepts of “literature” and “civilization” really are. The author also provides a historical overview of the early post-independence period in Haiti. In so doing, the author reorders our previously homogeneous view of Haiti, teasing out warring conceptions of the new nation that continued to play out deep into the twentieth century.
A Primer of Haitian Literature in Kreyòl
The early history of Haitian Kreyòl remains subject to intense debate among linguists, though there is no doubt it was the principal medium through which slave revolts were organized and the foundations of Haitian culture set. By the end of the nineteenth century there were already significant literary texts, in particular Oswald Durand’s “Choucoune” and Georges Sylvian’s Cric? Crac! During the thirties and forties, proponents of Kreyòl struggled to have it recognized as the national language and standardized. This process did not bear fruit until the IPN (Institut de pédagogie national) orthography became official in the eighties. Beginning in the fifties, there had already been a renais- sance of poetry in Kreyòl, the leading figure of which was Feliks Moriso-Lewa. At least two generations of writers have followed in his footsteps. In the person of Franketyèn, Kreyòl has one of the most fascinating contemporary writers in world literature.