L’Ouverture, 1901–1915: Sylvain, the École Nationale, and the opening of a Haitian Creole debate

Abstract

ABSTRACTA century after the slaves of Saint-Domingue won their liberty, their descendants, the free peasantry of the Republic of Haiti, remained impoverished and without access to channels of recourse. Their isolation was exacerbated by the linguistic divide in Haiti, where French was the exclusive language of official and written contexts while the majority of the population spoke only Haitian Creole. At the start of the twentieth century, a movement began to dismantle this linguistic hierarchy. Haitian poets and novelists started using Creole in their works of literature in order to contest the notion that Creole was an inferior language. They believed that a linguistic revolution would allow Haiti’s monolingual masses to participate in public life for the first time in Haiti’s history. Georges Sylvain, Frédéric Marcelin, and their colleagues effectively opened the debate around the status of Creole, and founded a national literature in the process.