Yanick Lahens Research Articles

“Les femmes dans l’ombre”: Gendering the 1946 Revolution in Haitian Literature

This article examines revolutionary episodes, particularly the events of January 1946 in Haiti, which stage the exclusion/inclusion of women’s bodies in post-revolutionary politics. These were tensions with which Haiti’s first revolutionary generation had already grappled following national independence in 1804. Here, we will consider how the revolution was gendered, how it was experienced through the female body, and how the women of the revolution were represented in Haiti’s cultural and journalistic sphere of the mid-1940s. We will then examine how revolutionary women and the events of January 1946 have been portrayed in Haitian literature, including the writings of former revolutionaries like Gérald Bloncourt and novels by women such as Marie Vieux Chauvet and Yanick Lahens. Through the tradition of a female revolutionary spirit, its revival in 1946, and its subsequent literary reincarnations, this article examine how Haiti’s revolutionary women have historically played a role in shaping national identity and how fictional landscapes continue to be shaped by the collective memory of previous generations of female revolutionaries. It concludes that taking gendered, embodied, and intergenerational perspectives into account can be a useful way of diversifying our understanding of Haiti’s multiple historic legacies of revolution.

Translating the Francophone Caribbean: Centering Black Production, Decentering Translation Practices

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).

Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean by Jason Herbeck

Reviewed by: Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean by Jason Herbeck Lucy Swanson Jason Herbeck, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean, Liverpool University Press, 2017, 340 pp. With Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean, Jason Herbeck offers an insightful and innovative contribution to discussions of identity formation in the literature of Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Herbeck's nuanced close readings of recent works by writers from the region and comparative approach to studying French Caribbean literature and cultures are two of the book's greatest strengths. They make Architextual Authenticity a compelling intervention into two complex questions: firstly, how can "authentic" Caribbean identities be constructed in light of the region's diasporic roots in the Middle Passage? Secondly, despite the absence of an original "French Caribbean culture," how do writers from the former French colonies craft an Antillean literary specificity that neither reproduces French metropolitan literature (with a bit of exotic couleur locale), nor idealizes lost African roots (as Césaire has been accused of in his theorization of négritude)? Herbeck explores these questions, as the book's title indicates, through an examination of the literary theme of architecture—studying works in which houses allegorize Caribbean identity construction—and through these works' architexture, the "meta-textual construction of texts" (10)—in this case, their references to and engagement with previous works of French Caribbean literature. In the introduction, Herbeck frames this approach in relation to the "Colonocene," through a discussion of francophone postcolonial theory—including a broad discussion of these issues by writers like Albert Memmi as [End Page 121] well as more specifically by the theorists of antillanité and créolité, and in light of recent scholarship on French Caribbean identity and narratological and formal aspects of postcolonial literature in French. The first chapter serves as an extension of the introduction. Through an exploration of the Haitian Gingerbread house, it lays out how architecture can serve as a lens for examining the construction of French Caribbean identity. Specifically, Herbeck analyzes writing that attempts to pinpoint the Haitian specificity of this architectural style that draws on European traditions (Victorian and French). One interesting moment is the discussion of the implications of the decline of "authentic" architecture in post-earthquake Haiti in light of the ongoing intervention of NGOs. Herbeck subsequently applies this exploration of literal structures to close readings of literary structures in short stories by Haitian writers Yanick Lahens and Evelyne Trouillot. This approach frames the close readings found in the second through fifth chapters of Architextual Authenticity, each of which studies a different writer. Chapter two focuses on Edouard Glissant's La Lézarde (1958), adding a case study of the Maison de la Source to the existing body of scholarship on the writer's landscapes and shedding new light on the way the author reflects on Martinican identity in the wake of the 1946 departmentalization of the French Antilles. In chapter three, Herbeck considers Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé's seminal Traversée de la mangrove (1989), and in particular the Propriété Alexis inhabited by Francis Sancher before his death. Herbeck's discussion of Condé's multiethnic and multicultural representation of Guadeloupe is particularly interesting where he discusses Condé's debate with créoliste Patrick Chamoiseau, and in his reading of Traversée's intertextual relationship with Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis's Gouverneurs de la rosée (1944). The fourth chapter offers an extended discussion of the Maison des Flamboyants in Daniel Maximin's L'Île et une nuit (1995), arguing Condé's Traversée is a "latent intertext" (173) with Maximin's novel. Herbeck convincingly reads the porous structure of the Maison des Flamboyants—which initially helps it withstand the onslaught of a hurricane—as a metaphor for Caribbean identity construction as an open, flexible and ongoing process. It is, he writes, "necessary to consider the concept of resistance in L'Île as a vital process of negotiation rather than as unconditional opposition to or outright obstruction of external influences" (202). The fifth and final chapter returns to the context of post-earthquake Haiti evoked in the first chapter...

Activistes féministes: Francophone Women Writers and International Human Rights

Several prominent contemporary Francophone women writers have embraced activism in compelling forms. In her written creations, Maïssa Bey from Algeria has continually called attention to the lack of women’s rights in her homeland; she has also initiated writing workshops for women to reflect and express themselves. Fatou Diome, who left Senegal for Strasbourg, has shed light in her work on racism and sexism that African immigrants often face in Europe, and she has created an association in her homeland to help individuals become financially solvent. Yanick Lahens from Haiti has similarly devoted herself to activist endeavours on her island, including co-founding a library and working with youth after the earthquake. As these authors seek to create compassion through writing, they also promote empathy through their engagement outside the text, empowering people of various backgrounds by providing them with literacy skills, business acumen, and a sense that their story matters.

Migration and Refuge: An Eco-archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017 by John Patrick Walsh

Reviewed by: Migration and Refuge: An Eco-archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017 by John Patrick Walsh Robert Decker Migration and Refuge: An Eco-archive of Haitian Literature, 1982–2017. By John Patrick Walsh. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. ISBN 13: 9781786941633. 254 pp. £90.00 hardcover. John Patrick Walsh's book Migration and Refuge: An Eco-archive of Haitian Literature represents a new and important approach to Haitian literary studies at a moment when an increasing number of scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with existing models of postcolonial scholarship. Although, as the title suggests, Walsh primarily examines narratives of human displacement, he breaks away from conventional paradigms of hybridity and identity formation by centering questions of political ecology. The book addresses the imbrication of ecological, geological, and social catastrophes in Haitian literature during a period beginning in the final years of the Duvalier era and continuing into the contemporary moment. Drawing inspiration from Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence," which designates "a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all," Walsh proposes to read Haitian literature as what he terms an eco-archive.1 "At its most basic," he explains, the eco-archive "denotes a body of literary texts that depict ecological change over time and its impact on matters of social and environmental justice. The prefix 'eco' refers to the shared, lived space of ecological problems, between humans and non-humans, and 'archive' to the accumulation of texts that reveal overlapping histories of past and present" (3). As this book convincingly demonstrates, contemporary Haitian literature portrays social and environmental catastrophes such as the violence of the Duvalier regime or the 2010 earthquake not as discrete, exceptional events but rather as part of the longue durée of Haitian history. Walsh's study begins with a quotation from Yanick Lahens's Failles (2010), a narrative of the earthquake that devastated Haiti. The prominent position of Lahens's account centers the disaster within Walsh's book (indeed, the central section, Part II, engages with explicitly postseismic texts), and this focus on the heavily mediatized event of the earthquake might seem to contradict Walsh's stated interest in more expansive models of time. However, Lahens's elaboration of the concept of the fault line gestures beyond the immediate effects of the earthquake itself and comes to serve as a central critical metaphor in Walsh's work: whereas the disaster itself takes on the character of a discrete event, the underlying fault line belongs to a time-scale of wholly different proportions. Furthermore, as Lahens [End Page 144] argues and Walsh underlines, the earthquake "exposed a crosshatching of social, economic, and political fault lines" (2) that likewise belong to deeper histories that radiate outward and come into relation with broader narratives of globalizing modernity. The geological fault line responsible for the seismic event in 2010 thus connects with dividing lines of human invention: the class lines separating the wealthy Haitian elite from their impoverished compatriots, the forbidden shorelines of the United States' southern coasts, and the color line that continues to fracture societies of the greater Americas well into the twenty-first century. This understanding of ecology as including both human and nonhuman actors and involving a set of histories more conventionally understood as the purview of the social sciences may surprise readers expecting an ecocritical perspective focused on literary descriptions of plants, animals, or landscapes. However, the expanded scope of Walsh's conception of the notion of ecology constitutes one of the great strengths of this book. His comparative reading of Lahens along with philosophers such as Michel Serres and Bruno Latour convincingly indicates "the gap between the environmentalist concerns of European and North American writers and those in the Caribbean" (9) and provides a valuable corrective to more Eurocentric notions of ecocriticism that assume a homogenous understanding of humanity and the way it interacts with the environment. In Part I, "The Eco-archive," Walsh reflects on the ways in which Caribbean thought has postulated the sociocultural ramifications of a history of human migration, beginning with the...

La chair linguistique des femmes Quand le texte se fait corps et sexe

At length stripped of any free and independent voice by male writers, Haitian and African novelists shattered the taboos surrounding sex and a liberated sexual expression during the second half of the 20th century. By exploring sexuality and sensuality in their work, these writers courageously managed to break free from the outskirts of society and reshape the inferior identity unjustly attributed to them by the literary canons. As there is a gap in in-depth research on this subject, our study aims to explore the different ways in which female sexuality is constructed on paper. The novels by Calixthe Beyala, Frieda Ekotto, Ken Bugul, Margaret Papillon, Yanick Lahens and Kettly Mars will allow us to focus on three themes often recurring in the female universe: violence, madness and prostitution. Particularly, the research will take into consideration the enunciative and discursive modalities, as well as the stylistic techniques that enabled these authors to enhance a strong female subjectivity through their bodies.

Haïti 2042: les possibles futurs by Gary Victor

Reviewed by: Haïti 2042: les possibles futurs by Gary Victor Linda Alcott Victor, Gary. Haïti 2042: les possibles futurs. C3, 2017. ISBN 978-99970-5947-5. Pp. 127. For those dedicated followers of Haitian life, literature and culture, there is more often than not an inherent cautiousness associated with envisioning the country's future. And even though that wariness may be justifiable based on past, present, and presumed realities, it is indeed both a productive and yet challenging exercise to imagine just what the coming years hold for the citizens of Haiti and, most importantly, for its youth. Gary Victor's collection of short stories gleaned from the twelve winning laureates in a scholarly fictional writing competition (there were over 1000 total submissions for this fourth edition of the contest) gives us possible answers and [End Page 252] much unsettling food for thought in a superb collection of predictions for Haiti in the year 2042. Following Victor's prescribed incipit which sets up a several hour visit to the future via a time machine, these "écrivains en herbe" (12) manage to create compelling futuristic scenarios which are deftly communicated with distinct individualism and impressive writing styles. Equally impressive are the distinguished jury members who chose the winning narratives including, among others, Dany Laferrière, Gary Victor, Kettly Mars, and Yanick Lahens. Some of the broadly treated subjects interjected into many of the texts are understandable references to present-day Haitian and global concerns: a continuation of issues between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; ongoing political corruption; additional natural disasters; a war that finally takes place between the United States and North Korea, and planetary destruction due to ozone neglect. More hopeful passages in the collection, though notably fewer in number, point to the enormous affection and positive vision these young writers have for their country and whose predictions of problems solved sit in stark contrast to the more somber texts. As Joédyne Jean-Baptiste expresses: "Le panorama était trop parfait. Les larges avenues étaient impeccablement asphaltées. Les trottoirs bien délimités sans les habituels commerçants qui les occupaient anarchiquement. Il n'y avait plus cette odeur fétide de l'eau dans les rigoles et dans les égouts" (142). Or as Gil Sander Joseph writes: "Je m'étonnais de découvrir les récentes recherches scientifiques qui avaient abouti: guérison du cancer, traitement plus efficace contre le SIDA, robotisation des voitures. Tout cela me passionnait et me faisait oublier un instant que le monde était affreux" (178). But a clearly dominant and most heartening theme in the volume is the notion that Haitians, now and in the future, have control over their destiny and must have the courage to assume individual and collective responsibility for the country's advancement. As aptly stated by Étienne Oremil in the Avant-Propos: "On constate avec bonheur que beaucoup de participants à ce concours décrivent la possibilité d'un sauvetage collectif. Ce recueil de textes habités, pour la plupart, par un esprit positif de persévérance intelligente, mérite d'être lu et diffusé à grande échelle" (12). As such, this text is a worthy addition to Haitian literature course reading lists "comme outil de vulgarisation de la littérature jeunesse, d'incitation à la lecture et à l'écriture" (12) and one's personal collection. [End Page 253] Linda Alcott University of Colorado, Denver Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Douces déroutes by Yanick Lahens

Reviewed by: Douces déroutes by Yanick Lahens Jason Herbeck Lahens, Yanick. Douces déroutes. Sabine Wespieser, 2018. ISBN 978-2-84805-280-9. Pp. 164. Il est difficile de dire avec précision ce sur quoi s'ouvre le cinquième roman de Lahens. Le premier chapitre nous fait découvrir Cyprien Novilus, jeune stagiaire dans un cabinet d'avocats qui, s'arrêtant en bon citoyen à un feu rouge dans sa modeste Hyundai Tucson, fait l'inventaire des nombreux obstacles réels et abstraits qui l'empêchent de circuler à son aise dans Port-au-Prince. Deux citations placées en exergue au roman servent alors à souligner en premier lieu la problématique de cette perspective individuelle qui, si intime soit-elle, ne saurait toutefois se détacher, voire se libérer, de l'univers grouillant qui l'impressionne. Or, entre les exergues et le chapitre premier s'étale une lettre d'amour de la part du juge Raymond Berthier à sa femme. Apprenant à cette dernière qu'il dispose de preuves compromettantes contre certains individus redoutables qu'il compte poursuivre en justice, Berthier explique aussi son refus de céder aux menaces subséquentes qui ont été faites sur sa personne. Ainsi lorsqu'un ami bien intentionné lui rappelle qu'il a une femme et une fille, et que "[s]a voiture n'était plus très confortable pour les rues défoncées de la capitale" (10), ce juge intègre ne rentre-t-il pas dans les rangs. Au contraire, il laisse à son épouse un message passionné dont l'aspect proleptique ne tarde à se confirmer par son assassinat révélé dans les pages qui suivent. De par son ton et la place ambigüe qu'elle occupe dans le livre, la lettre de Berthier finit par planer sur tout le récit de Lahens. Dans la mesure où elle proclame un amour tout aussi personnel (envers les siens) qu'universel (de la justice), la missive du juge témoigne aussi du revers de la nature humaine, de cette ambition sans bornes ni scrupules qui risque de tout faire basculer dans le vide. Après tout, "Ici, vivre, c'est dompter les chutes" (13). Et tandis que certains, dont la fille du juge (Brune), son oncle et leurs compagnons, s'acharnent à rester sur la bonne voie malgré tout, Lahens nous montre dans Douces déroutes combien il est difficile de s'y tenir, voire facile de s'en détourner. En témoignent Cyprien—petit ami de Brune et ancien étudiant en droit du juge Berthier—et Joubert—alias Jojo Piman piké—dont l'adhésion tacite au pragmatisme selon lequel "rien ne se donne, tout se prend" (132) leur permet de gravir les échelons de la société par des voies opposées mais toutes les deux corrompues. En raison de leurs (basses) manœuvres, celui-ci arrive à troquer sa Suzuki Vitara contre une Kia neuve, et celui-là, devant l'embarras du choix, finit par remplacer sa Hyundai par une Porsche Cayenne et une Range Rover. Alors que [End Page 257] Berthier revendique le besoin humain de "voyages aveugles, sans filets, sans garde-fous, vers la beauté" (11), le récit à la fois lyrique et sobre de Lahens présente une société haïtienne contemporaine dans laquelle les dangers que l'on court ne proviennent pas forcément d'un simple manque d'attention, mais du fait que tout le monde ne respecte pas le même code de la route. Jason Herbeck Boise State University (ID) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

The Ordinary Disaster

The Ordinary Disaster Yanick Lahens Translated by Gayle A. Levy Mirna woke up to the mauve light of the dawn, between moon and sun, in a silence broken occasionally by the husky rasp of waves on sand. The room was plunged in a murky light, and the halting purr of the air-conditioner gave off a dampness that almost paralyzed her. Limbs numb, she lay still, frozen in the unmoving time of this closed space. If not for the tingling in her nipples and the slight bruise between her thighs, it would have felt like this body, hers for almost twenty years, suddenly was no longer a part of her. She half-opened her eyes to examine the walls, the window, the sheets, and then the walls again. In that brief panic, the stunned confusion of someone waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom in a strange city. She slid under the covers, closed her eyes for a moment and all at once remembered: the night before the curtains had been carefully closed by William, and for the first time she, Mirna, had slept in this hotel by the sea with a man she hardly knew. She felt a slight twinge in her heart, bit the inside of her cheek hard, and suddenly wanted to be back in the purity of the morning, tasting her first sip of coffee, under the almond trees along the beach. When she stretched slowly under the sheets, it was to forget everything: the burning in her mouth, her life among the defeated, and her body which hungered for the first time. Her right arm fell heavily on William’s bare chest as he slept beside her. He moaned softly in his sleep and turned over as though to hug her. Mirna, forgetting for one moment the pure morning outside, closed her eyes again in this silent, dim bedroom, and let life pulsate through her, as it did in the blind and deaf almond trees. Mirna had met William one month earlier when thousands of men and women greeted the American soldiers in an ecstasy that approached a hypnotic trance. Some bodies were burned, tires tightly wound around their necks, and old women accused of witchcraft were lynched at random. Embassy waiting rooms never emptied of tie-wearing loyalists, engaged artists, and sophisticated professionals: everyone in a hurry to be in the right place at the right time. Behind their microphones, reporters concealed the shame of occupation with all kinds of lies about the joy that would soon fill our hearts and soothe our souls. All of this flooded our chests, as intoxicating as hot rum. Mirna had herself gone to the port to welcome their liberators, a smile on her lips like the others, a short skirt revealing the muscles of her long, black legs. She thought the uniformed GIs were handsome and powerful but deep within she desperately sought warriors from her own island who would resemble those in the first history books she read as a child. All for naught. Very quickly this jubilation left her empty. There were seven of them: Lucien, Norma, Simone, Nicole, Mirna, their mother Octavie, and their aunt Violette. Seven living in three narrow rooms: one living room and two bedrooms in one of the neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince whose houses were concrete but twisted, with mangy walls, half-painted, half-built, their guts, hair, and fingers of steel spilling out. Where the drunk streets stagger from time to time without completely toppling over. Which is to say, Mirna’s neighborhood was not only made of mold and rot. This was not one of those neighborhoods where, between the shacks, the intertwined alleys with their bad breath disgusted each other. It was a partly wormy fruit into which [End Page 76] hungry teeth could still bite. But, nonetheless, it was a neighborhood inhabited by the defeated, where men and women spent most of their time in mutual mistrust. If behind these walls mistrust often stood in for love, it was because those whom the defeated should truly have mistrusted were too far away. So, they directed their attention to their neighbors, the new arrivals or the improvised...

Intertexts of the Ecological: Literary Space Revisited in Yanick Lahens's Bain de lune

By focusing on specific intertextual references found in Yanick Lahens's 2014 novel Bain de lune , this paper demonstrates how the long-term viability of the Haitian ecology is challenged both on a literary level and in accordance with evolving social, environmental, and identitarian realities.

Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times by Martin Munro

Reviewed by: Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times by Martin Munro Mollie McFee Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times. By Martin Munro. University of Virginia Press, 2015. ISBN 9780813938202. 240 pp. $29.50 US. Paperback. Martin Munro's Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times draws together a number of novels and films that, Munro argues, cast certain cataclysmic events of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Haitian history in apocalyptic terms. Across the book's four chapters, Munro defines apocalypse in three distinct ways: 1) a unique relationship to time in a society marked by ongoing tragedy, 2) the uncovering of traumatic memory, and 3) the almost utopian promise of new beginnings following the end of an era. "Apocalypse" and its adjectival form "apocalyptic" are also frequently used to describe the conditions of poverty and destitution portrayed in many of the cultural productions Munro studies in the book. Though Munro repeatedly nods to the 2010 earthquake that wrought destruction across Haiti, he does not study it at length. Rather, Munro states that this apocalypse "had been prepared for, indeed prophesied to some degree in religious and political discourse, the arts, and culture more generally for decades, perhaps centuries" (1). The major crises Munro discusses are the Duvalier regimes and their effects and the violence perpetrated by the Chimères, militarized supporters of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Munro also discusses phenomena such as evangelical Protestantism and the potentially destructive environment as significant contributors to the apocalyptic strain in Haitian culture. Munro's discussion of post-Duvalier accounts of traumas induced by that regime introduces a particularly innovative understanding of apocalypse. The book's first chapter makes use of the Greek definition of the term, meaning "to unveil or uncover," to explore works that narrate the repressed traumatic past of the Duvalier years. Munro states, "Narrative is thus a means of invoking the past in order to break with the sense of living endlessly in that time, and memory becomes a means of resistance, a deferred way of challenging the dictatorships and the amnesia that allows the terror of the past to haunt still the present" (40). The apocalyptic action of uncovering memory thus inaugurates a new era in which the past is no longer an endlessly present terror. The chapter turns to four texts that narrate the traumatic conditions of the Duvalier regimes: Raoul Peck's film L'Homme sur les quais (1993), Kettly Mars's novel Saisons sauvages (2010), Edwidge Danticat's novel The Dew Breaker (2004), and Évelyne Trouillot's novel La Mémoire aux abois (2010). With the exception of Mars's novel, each [End Page 180] of the case studies narrates confrontations with memory following trauma, depicting the phenomenon as freeing. In the case of Saisons sauvages, Munro argues that Mars's portrayal of the regime's horrors serves as a warning and a defense against the return of dictatorial rule. In the second and third chapters, which discuss the presidencies of former priest, liberation theologian, and populist politician Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Munro's close readings use "apocalyptic" to describe catastrophic, dystopian, or surreal descriptions in the films and novels he analyzes. Titled "Utopian Ends: Aristide and the Apocalypse" and "The Chimères and the Haitian Antihero," these chapters describe the troubling figure Aristide presents in Haitian history and culture. Aristide's radically egalitarian rhetoric was initially seen as the beacon of a new, post-Duvalier era in Haiti. However, these dreams were dashed when Aristide's supporters inflicted widespread violence upon Haitian society and were themselves unable to escape conditions of poverty. The novels and films Munro examines (including Lyonel Trouillot's Rue des pas perdus [1996], Raoul Peck's film Moloch Tropical [2009], Yanick Lahens's novel La Couleur de l'aube [2008], and Charles Najman's documentary Haïti, la fin des chimères? [2004], to name only a few) certainly represent a dystopian urban Haiti that appears perpetually on the brink of both tragic destruction and utopian rebirth. The fourth chapter of Tropical Apocalypse does not focus on a particular apocalyptic event but rather addresses two distinct ways in which nature emerges as a force both...

The Talking Dead: Narrating the Past in Yanick Lahens's Bain de lune

Dead men tell no tales. However, in Haitian author Yanick Lahens's fourth novel, de lune (2014), the voice of recently murdered woman insists on being heard. What is remarkable in de lune is not, however, that the dead do indeed tell tales but rather how the tale is told. In the novel, Lahens employs two narrative voices: the first-person (je) narrator, linked to the mutilated body of Cetoute Florival that washes up on the shore of Haitian village, and the second-person plural (nous), which embodies an ambiguous collective of Haitian peasants and bourgeois landowners spanning time and space. These distinct narrative voices and the formal division between je and nous within the novel call into question conventional wisdom on the narrative capacity of the recently departed but also, and perhaps more importantly, illustrate the novel's active engagement with the past, as de lune undermines traditional distinctions of past, present and future.Recipient of the prestigious Prix Femina in 2014, de lune traces the lives of two Haitian families through narrative that spans from the US Occupation of Haiti in the early twentieth century to the present day. Adding breadth and complexity to rich story, two distinct yet overlapping narrative voices unfold the history of the Lafleur and Mesidor families. To help manage the plurality of voices and myriad characters, the novel includes two paratextual elements. The first is family tree spanning at least seven generations, and the second is glossary of the Kreyol terms and Vodou spirits that appear within the text. Ostensibly serving as guides for the reader, these elements send another message: de lune is rooted in Haiti's and unpacking that history requires specific tools for uncovering the past. This article reveals and examines the narrative elements Lahens employs to engage Haiti's history. Specifically, I argue, the two distinct narrative voices offer historical matrix that allows the novel to uncover Haiti's history in way that challenges traditional historiographical practices.To fully appreciate the novel's position within contemporary Haitian literature, it is imperative to understand its lineage within the contexts of both Haitian literature and Lahens's previous works of fiction. More specifically, I consider the implications of what seems to be return to the Haitian peasant novel amid post-earthquake literary production in Haiti. Furthermore, the fact that Lahens revisits characters and themes that appear in short story titled Bain de Lune, from 1999, reinforces the significance of return to the past in the production of the novel. This double return surrounding the book's genesis works with the dual narrative voices employed in the novel to reveal an active, almost inescapable, engagement with the past and further uncover complicated, ambivalent relationship to history. Contradicting previous notions of pastlessness within the Caribbean, de lune reveals an overabundance of the past, perhaps highlighting the singularity of Haitian authors and their relationship to history as distinct from other Caribbean authors.1Freak of HistoryRecent scholarship has focused on Haiti's position in globalized framework, drawing attention to what the editors of special edition of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies have called a new understanding of Haiti's place in the world, and the world's place in Haiti.2 This special edition seeks to posit Haiti as an active player in globalized world, suggesting that the nation should not be seen as an aberration, a freak of history, but rather an integral part of the history of the Western world.3If indeed Haiti is central player in globalized world, it has rarely played by the rules, often disrupting or outright discrediting Western discourses on statehood, revolution, and history. For instance, Michael T. Clark suggests, in the modern era of nation states, Haiti has never existed as sovereign state but rather as a field of power between the Haitian peasantry and the outside world. …

"We are your Neighbors": Edwidge Danticat's New Narrative for Haiti

"We are your Neighbors":Edwidge Danticat's New Narrative for Haiti Robyn Cope In the wake of the world's ruinously misguided humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, it became clear that widespread and deeply held notions of Haitian exceptionalism continued to plague Haiti's relationship with the rest of the world.1 As a result, many Haitian and Diaspora authors and scholars called for new narratives for Haiti that inspire neither admiration nor pity but real empathy with Haitians among their transnational readership.2 In 2013, Edwidge Danticat published Claire of the Sea Light, the tale of one day in the life of Ville Rose, a fictional Haitian fishing village whose inhabitants are wonderfully, tragically, and inextricably tied to one another, whether they know it or not. This article argues that Claire of the Sea Light answers post-earthquake calls for new narratives by casting Haitians as neither sub- nor superhuman Others but rather as neighbors. Danticat accomplishes this by deconstructing the very notion of humanization, shifting the novel's focus away from legitimizing her characters' humanity and toward cultivating her readers' humaneness. The Call for "New Narratives" In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a considerable body of scholarship refuting Haitian insularity and exceptionalism emerged within Haitian literary and cultural studies. Scholars and artists alike insisted on the global impact of Haitian history and the universal appeal of Haitian literature. Nick Nesbitt's revisiting of the Haitian Revolution at its bicentennial, for example, placed that uprising squarely at the heart of human heritage, reasserting its universal importance as the greatest political event of the Enlightenment era and one of the primary events of modern history.3 A few years later, in 2007, Haitian authors Dany Laferrière and Gary Victor were among the signatories of "Pour une littérature-monde en français" ("For a World Literature in French"), a manifesto that advocated for literature that uses French as a vehicle of [End Page 98] expression for diverse specific experiences as well as universal human questions.4 Martin Munro's "Haiti's Worldly Literature" identified Haitian literature as the epitome of that very littérature-monde. Reductive race- and nation-based currents like Indigenism and Africanism, insisted Munro, are not representative of Haitian literature as a whole, even in the twentieth century. He cited Jacques Roumain's deracialized universalism, René Depestre's rooted nomadism, and Dany Laferrière's fluid, worldly vision of identity as well-known examples of Haitian literature's ongoing engagement with the world.5 At the time, these debates about Haiti's rightful place in and relationship to the rest of the world seemed destined to remain in the realm of the abstract, of little concern to the average non-Haitian. Then, following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti—not only among the deadliest quakes in history but also a humanitarian disaster of catastrophic proportions in terms of destruction and displaced population—Haiti captured the world's attention. Sadly, observed a frustrated Yanick Lahens in the weeks and months following the calamity, the massive global humanitarian response did not always respect the collective will of the Haitian people and fell short of true global solidarity among equals.6 "In spite of those limits, in spite of its poverty, of its political tribulations, of its small size, Haiti is not marginal," wrote the indignant Lahens in Failles (Fault lines) in 2010. "Its history makes it a center. I have always experienced it that way. As a metaphor for all the challenges humanity must face today and for which this modernity hasn't kept its promises. Its history allows it to enter into a dialogue between equals with the rest of the world."7 Mainstream news coverage of the cataclysm and its aftermath deteriorated into reproducing stereotypes of Haiti and Haitians as eternal and perpetual victims. Over the past seven years, authors and scholars have repeatedly countered that stubbornly lopsided perception with reminders of Haiti's status as an important global center and integral part of the Americas and the world. Haiti was the inspiration for hemispheric slave rebellions and the staunch supporter of independence movements around the world...

Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010 by Martin Munro

Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010. By Martin Munro. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-78138-146-5. 254 pp. £75.Review by Chantal KenolIn his introduction to Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010, Martin Munro states the book's raison d'etre in the form of questions:What are the effects of a catastrophic earthquake on a society, its culture and politics? Which of these effects are temporary, or do they manifest themselves over time? is the relationship between natural disasters and social change? roles do artists, and writers in particular, have in witnessing, bearing testimony to, and gauging the effects of natural disasters? These are the fundamental questions addressed in this book. (2)To explore these questions, Munro examines essays, chronicles, and testimonies written about the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, novels by authors who emerged on the literary horizon after the event, and fiction and poetry published by established authors. He then examines works published after the earthquake that do not specifically mention the event and seem to be untouched by it, providing a more comprehensive and unrestricted overview of Haitian literary production after the 2010 disaster.The first chapter, Post-earthquake Essay, deals with the event most directly by analyzing works whose thematic focus is the writer's personal reflections on the quake itself. In doing so, it addresses most explicitly Munro's important question about the writer's role and responsibility when an event of such magnitude affects the space he or she lives in or comes from. The author considers nonfiction works by Edwidge Danticat (Create Dangerously, 2010), Dany Laferriere (Tout bouge autour de moi, 2011), Rodney Saint-Eloi (Haiti, kenbe la!, 2010), Yanick Lahens (Failles, 2010), and Gary Victor (Collier de debris, 2013). For each one, he is particularly interested in how significant, useful, or relevant the work of writers is perceived to be in such circumstances, both by the writer herself or himself and by her or his readership. In most cases (Danticat, SaintEloi, Laferriere), there is as least one moment when the writers question their right or ability to write about the traumatic event. Their reliability as witnesses and the legitimacy of their voices are mostly assessed by whether or not they experienced the event directly, or whether or not they continue to live in the space where it happened and see firsthand its impact on the lives of thousands of injured, displaced, or otherwise affected people. For example, Munro reports that Danticat wonders if words are capable of describing such suffering and loss. Furthermore, as a diasporic writer, she questions her legitimate right to write about it since she was not present at the time of the event: were not there. . . . You did not live it. You have no right even to speak-for you, for them, for anyone (31, quoting Danticat). Lahens shies away from fiction and seems to feel that only direct testimony and chronicles are able to describe faithfully the incredible impact of the catastrophe on the space and its inhabitants. Munro reports a question she asks as she pulls out from under the rubble the remnants of a fictional romance she was writing before the earthquake: What purpose could a love story serve amidst such suffering and horror? (54, quoting Lahens). Laferriere, who was in Haiti at the time of the earthquake, feels pressure from his readers living elsewhere to bring news of the event to them and to supply his interpretation of and thoughts on it.In these nonfiction pieces, the past and the future of Haiti are addressed in varying degrees. For some writers, like Danticat and Laferriere, the earthquake triggers both personal and collective memories. It also awakens a sense of nostalgia for what used to be and what may be permanently lost, such as historical and cultural landmarks. …

The Global Frame of Haiti in Yanick Lahens' Failles

By way of a review of recent theories of the “global”, this article performs a close reading of Yanick Lahens's Failles (Paris: Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2010) to argue that the text's “globalized frame of Haiti” is both literary and historical. Failles encompasses a number of genres that, looking within and without, offers a challenging critique of the international humanitarian response to Haiti. Lahens attempts to “recenter” Haiti by rereading the present through the past, notably through the discursive field of Albert Camus's critical journalism and his essay, L'Homme révolté (Essais. Paris:Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965).

Bain de lune by Yanick Lahens

62 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 glance at Lily’s handsome father while Lily was playing, Lily disappeared into the forest. Years later, Jane is an archivist at a London museum. As the museum lives its last few days before closing, Jane decides to pick up her old research and, perhaps, give herself some closure. The Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics was a Victorian-era asylum holding mental patients from around the country. Jane began researching this institute in college as her final dissertation. Even after the assignment was complete, however, the research opened up one mystery Jane had never managed to solve—the disappearance of a young girl, titled N in the historical logbooks, after her escape from the hospital in the 1870s. Now, after the closing of the museum, she began stirring up thoughts of Lily. This time, Jane was more determined than ever to find Lily, N, or, at least, herself. Told through the narratives of a collection of people, this novel opens up more questions than answers. It bridges time between the past and present in a way that shows the connections of different lives through different ages. It provokes the imagination to think not only of those around but also beyond us. Janny Gandhi University of Oklahoma Yanick Lahens. Bain de lune. Paris. Sabine Wespieser Éditeur. 2014. isbn 9782848051178 Yanick Lahens’s Bain de lune chronicles the history of a family in rural Haiti over four-plus generations. Tertulian Mésidor’s ardent stare at sixteen-year-old Olmène, sitting beside her mother at the fish market , initiates the plot. With cinematographic close-ups, Lahens records the sighting of the young peasant girl by the community’s most powerful don, a fifty-five-year-old man whose family had forced the sale of her family’s land and killed the seller besides. The object of Tertulian’s desire yet aware of his reputation, Olmène, and her mother, are nonetheless impressed by the virility of the man on horseback. Moreover, he buys all their wares. Mésidor’s stare, the prelude of forceful possession, determines Olmène’s destiny , the inevitablility of which she accepts. Subsequently, under the mapou tree, her father discusses the terms of the union with Mésidor. She gets a cow, new shoes, and a house that doesn’t leak. There is no coumbite as Tertulian has the house built by his men. Olmène, aware the profligate man who impregnated her is married, gives birth to Dieudonné five months after settling in. After learning Tertulian participated in World Literature in Review an unarmed peasant’s murder, however, Olmène, alone, unsubmissively leaves her family in Anse Bleue and never returns. The family’s subsequent disintegration is embedded, more overtly, in twentiethcentury Haitian history. In 1962 the local representatives of Haiti’s strongman in the capital, the man with a black hat, started assuming power in Anse Bleue, and even Mésidor allies himself with them in time. The power shift clearly affects the family since Olmène’s brother joins Duvalier’s militia . With the fall of Duvalier, the village will take out its wrath on militia members while, alerted, Tertulian crossed the Dominican border at night dressed as a woman. The Party of the Destitute then takes power, but Anse Bleue seems little changed. Lahens orchestrates her chronicle using two narrative voices. A third-person narrator relates the principal narrative thread. The frequent insertion of the pronoun nous tells us a villager observed, to cite an example, the interaction between Olmène and Tertulian. The novel opens and closes, though, with a first-person narrator whose thoughts are italicized. Those chapters are the musings of Cétoute Olmène Thérèse, Dieudonné’s daughter and the granddaughter of Olmène. Cétoute regrets never having met her grandmother, with whom she feels a mysterious kinship. Cétoute adds a subjective, feminine vision to the history determined by men. Through her we see the force history and invisible divinities exert on the family. Like her grandmother’s infatuation for Tertulian and the former’s possession by Erzuli Fréda, Cétoute is enthralled by Tertulian’s grandson, who has...

Preface

Preface Juliette M. Rogers With this, the twenty-third volume of Women in French Studies, I am very honored and proud to start my term as Editor in Chief and to continue the tradition of providing top-notch research on French and francophone women to our members and to researchers worldwide. I would like to begin my first “Editor’s Preface” by thanking the hard work and incredible talent of my predecessors who worked as editor for this journal, including Annabelle Rea, Colette Trout, Adèle King, Frédérique Chevillot, Catherine Montfort, and, of course, our most recent editor, Dawn Cornelio. Dawn not only edited six annual volumes of Women in French Studies, but also just finished co-editing the volume of essays from our 2014 Women in French conference, held at her beautiful campus, the Université de Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her vast knowledge, wise counsel, and great attention to detail have made my transition this year so much easier, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart for all she has done to answer my questions over the past year. Merci mille fois, Dawn. I also give many thanks to our new Production Editor, Marijn S. Kaplan, for her fantastic formatting, proof reading, and editorial work that she has done for this volume; without her skills and effort, you would not be reading this text. And finally, I thank all the members of the Editorial Board who agreed to read and evaluate manuscripts this year, as well as experts from around the globe who often served as second readers for each article. Scholars from North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia provided detailed suggestions and comments that helped to form the articles that you will read here, and I am most grateful for their time and their expertise. As in past volumes, you will find enclosed between the covers of this latest tome a great variety of research, arranged in chronological order, as is our practice in our regular annual volumes. We begin in the nineteenth century with one of the most read and one of the least read works in French literary studies: Briana Lewis’s study of three women protagonists in Hugo’s Les Misérables and Daniel Hanna’s examination of the writings of a cloistered nun, Marie Aimée de Jésus, who spent much of her life writing against Ernest Renan’s 1863 publication Vie de Jésus. The articles then shift to the middle of the twentieth century, with Aubrey Jones Kubiak’s new approach to the classic Québécois text Bonheur d’occasion published in 1947 by Gabrielle Roy, and Kathleen Antonioli’s rereading of Le Deuxième sexe for a fresh interpretation of how de Beauvoir handled women writers. The last four articles discuss writers from the [End Page 8] 1980s to the present, beginning with Holly Collins’s article on three of Maryse Condé’s novels and their creolization of earlier stories, and Mercédès Baillargeon’s text that studies Christine Angot’s self-referential works on incest and how they and she have been received. Hanétha Vété-Congolo’s article on Fabienne Kanor’s 2004 novel D’eaux douces explores the influence of Paulette Nardal and Douboutisme on the construction of identity and the dynamics of the Martinican couple, and Laura Loth’s study of Yanick Lahens’s 2010 and 2013 works offers us an innovative way to reconcile this Haitian author’s pre- and post-earthquake approaches to writing. We round up this fine group of texts with an extensive and inspiring interview from 2013 by Thérèse De Raedt with Bestine Kazadi Ditabala, a lawyer, poet and activist for the women of the Democratic Republic of Congo whose collection of poems Infi(r)niment femme has just been republished by l’Harmattan press this year. We also have three book reviews to finish the volume. As you can see, our organization is tremendously fortunate to have members whose scholarship ranges so widely both in time and in geographic origin. I hope that in future volumes we will continue to expand those parameters, with articles on even earlier...

(Re)Reading the Ruins: Yanick Lahens’s Post-Earthquake Narrative Revisions

Haitian author Yanick Lahens, while attempting to describe the unthinkable devastation of the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, addresses the conundrum of the writer who faces such vast tragedy with the limited tools of language to exercise her craft and who must at the same time “write back” to a canon of clichés and reductive images that close Haiti into a discourse of disaster. Lahens published her account of the earthquake, Failles , in 2010, wherein she discussed the earthquake’s interruption of a fiction project she had begun before the quake. In 2013, she published that project as a novel entitled Guillaume et Nathalie . Lahens highlights the relevance of Haiti’s disaster and trauma narratives to the fields of trauma studies and postcolonial studies by foregrounding the ongoing process of remembering and representing trauma through rereading the disaster in her two works.

Traumatic Encounters: Negotiating Humanitarian Testimony in Post-earthquake Haiti

IntroductionImages of destruction and suffering relayed by survivors, journalists, and aid workers were essential to connecting the world to the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti and to generating the global expressions of solidarity that followed. Yet these attempts to bear witness to the catastrophe in Haiti for viewers at home often reinforced the distance between Haiti and the West. Despite their authors' stated compassion for and solidarity with the Haitian people, such accounts detached the crisis from its historical and political contexts to insert Haiti into what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the savage slot, a temporary stand-in for the global South, until the international media moved its catastrophe caravan on to the next disaster.1 Buried under this deluge of reports and survival accounts trying to make sense of the disaster, Haiti seemed beset once again by a shroud of otherness as the island quickly disappeared behind a mirage of images.2 As the immediate response to the earthquake reveals, testimony is a fundamental cog of the humanitarian machine that is important for publicizing causes, shaping perceptions, and mobilizing solidarities; as a result, it is also a fragile terrain of cross-cultural encounters fraught with the politics of writing or speaking for others.Five years after the 2010 earthquake, my objective in this article is to return to a number of long-form testimonies published in the immediate wake of the catastrophe to examine how these narratives grapple with the ethical, political, and ideological implications of representing the pain of others for audiences in Europe and North America. In their accounts of the disaster, US humanitarian filmmaker Gerard Straub, Haitian Canadian author and newly elected member of the French Academy Dany Laferriere, and Haitian writer Yanick Lahens all marshal a journalistic realism in their efforts to document and bear witness to this traumatic upheaval. These three authors also share a sustained concern for the production, circulation, and consumption of images of the disaster in the international public sphere. Though they are not humanitarian aid workers, Laferriere and Lahens relay representations of Haitian trauma into the same international public sphere wherein foreign humanitarians and journalists projected their own. Like Straub, Laferriere and Lahens also position their narratives as necessary rejoinders to deformations of Haitian history and culture that permeated many popular mainstream accounts of the disaster including, but not limited to, CNN's voyeuristic coverage as well as the heavily condemned remarks by Pat Robertson about Haiti's pact with the devil or David Brooks about its progress-resistant culture.3 The portraits of postquake Haiti that emerge from such testimonies bear witness to the reactions of the individuals and communities enmeshed in the catastrophe and the international humanitarian response to it.Humanitarianism, whether as disaster response or in the form of development, remains an important economic, political, and social interface that mediates power relations between the global North and South. In recent decades critics have denounced Western humanitarianism as a tool for the spread of neoliberal globalization, the opening of new markets, and the privatization of even greater swaths of Southern economies.4 However, in mainstream views of humanitarianism, Mark Schuller argues, the 2010 Haiti earthquake is particularly significant because it sparked the emergence of a short-lived discourse critical of humanitarian organizations in light of the grossly mismanaged recovery.5 The accounts by Straub, Laferriere, and Lahens that are at the center of my analysis actively participate in the emergent, yet fleeting, discourse that Schuller highlights. Combining foreign, diasporic, and national viewpoints with regard to Haiti, their narratives think critically about global NorthSouth relations in the humanitarian context. …

Failles by Yanick Lahens (review)

Failles by Yanick Lahens (review)