A Note on Rene Belance

Abstract

Rene Belance was born in 1915 in Corail, Haiti, not far from the coastal town (and homeland of poets) Jeremie. His mother made a meager living by selling candies in the marketplace. After winning a scholarship to the Lycee Petion of Port-au-Prince, considered the best secondary school in the country, Belance went on to Haiti's Ecole Normale. At twenty-five he published a first collection of poetry, Rythme de mon Coeur (1940); this was soon followed by Luminaires (1941) and a war poem in many sections, Pour Celebrer l'Absence (1943). As Belance later observed, his name was quickly pinned to a party label, quite independently of his own wishes: was classified as a surrealist right away because I had published a book [Luminaires] that was difficult to read.' Pour Celebrer l'Absence in particular became the pretext for polemics about difficulty, illogicality, preciosity and the respect due the lay reader. Mr. Belance compromises his work, his influence, his mission, by a greater number of awkward flaws than is tolerable in so short a book: useless preciosities, naive and unfortunate obscurities, complained Roger Dorsinville. Neither images nor ideas are approached in a simple, direct, intelligible manner. One would be relieved to learn that he calls himself a surrealist and rejects conventional clarity in the name of surrealism.2 When surrealism (in its European form) came to Haiti, late in 1945, in the persons of Andre Breton, Aime Cesaire, Wifredo Lam, Michel Leiris, and Alfred M6traux, Belance was immediately received into their company. Several of Belance's poems appear in important left-leaning anthologies of the postwar period, such as Leopold Sedar Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre3 and Presence Africaine's Haiti: Poetes noirs.4 Some scholars of Caribbean literature have mistakenly attributed to Belance a Parisian residence, while he was, in fact, pursuing rural education projects in Mexico and Haiti: the misjudgement amounts, perhaps, to disbelief that a homegrown voice could command such poetic authority.5 Belance was, meanwhile, pursuing other projects-projects to which he attributed more importance than to his poetic career. After two years of UNESCO-supported study in Mexico, Belance returned to Haiti and founded in the north of the island a school which would answer the need for teachers willing to take up the hard basic tasks of rural development: starting elementary schools, spreading literacy and with it the beginnings of economic and political change. (Fittingly, it was work on rural education projects that first brought Belance and Aime Cesaire together.) In the late 1940s, during the moderate government of Dumarsais Estime, he served for some years as chief administrator in the section of the ministry of national education concerned with teaching adults to read and write Creole/Kreyol. The middle and late