15883: Bellegarde-Smith: Haitian-Afro-Canadian Writers in French (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: P D Bellegarde-Smith <pbs@csd.uwm.edu>


"The Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History : The Black experience in the Americas."
Prof. Max Dorsinville, McGill, juin 2003



      Black Canadian Writers in French



   Black Canadian writers in French are of Haitian descent. Exiled by the chaos of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986), they are a few among the thousands of Haitians who fled their country in search of  asylum in Canada. Yet, the novels, short stories and poetry they wrote in Canada are not thematically --though they may be technically-- different from the mainstream of modernist and postcolonial writing. Expatriation and the quest for reinvention are recurrent features in the works of  Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, among modernists, and those of Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott and Michael Ondaatje, among postcolonials.

   Initially, Haitian writers in Canada had no alternative but to come to grips with expatriation. Their works succeeded when they were inscribed in a literary continuum whence the commonplace theme of exile was accompanied by reinvention in form; and they inversely failed when they did not respond to the demands placed on art by both modernists and postcolonials.

    While for the icons of modernism and postcoloniality the idea of home means the reinvention of place, most Haitian writers in Canada are at first locked in the idea and the concreteness of home they realistically represent, void of redefinition. Thus the foremost concern of the first generation of Haitian-Canadian writers is the nostalgic evocation of their lost homeland, and relatedly, the denunciation of the political regime responsible for that loss. The works of Gérard Etienne (Le Nègre crucifié), Emile Ollivier (Mère-Solitude, La Discorde aux cent voix, Les Urnes scellées), Anthony Phelps (Mémoire en colin-maillard, Moins l'infini), and Liliane Dévieux Dehoux (L'Amour, oui, la mort, non) are linked in that respect, being closely related to  the writers' personal experiences of the Duvalier regime that led to their expatriation. They see Haiti as a dichotomy of  victims and victimizers. The prevalent picture is one of relentless degradation unrelieved by the light of survival. Canada is nowhere present except as an implicit "clean and well-lighted place" that allows for the act of writing as catharsis.

    On the other hand, the works of a second generation of writers grouping Dany Laferrière, Stanley Péan, Joël DesRosiers, Marie-Célie Agnant and Georges Anglade are characterized by eclecticism in their formal and thematic reinvention beyond conventional realism.

     In his first novel, Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, Dany Laferrière, the better-known writer of the group, builds on Ollivier's early symbolic use of a Canadian setting in Paysage de l'aveugle. But, like Ollivier's, his characters are not Canadians. Ollivier's vision of the Duvalier years, at times leavened by satirical humor, is adapted by Laferrière who largely ignores them, while relying on  humor to undermine interracial taboos. Set in Haiti, his later work is mainly steeped in photographic images of childhood filtered by an elliptical  style of writing.

   Laferrière paves the way for the writings of Péan, DesRosiers and Agnant that intermingle different strategies distinct from the conventional representation of Haiti. However, nostalgia for the lost homeland is not altogether absent from Péan's La Plage des songes, Agnant's La Dot de Sara and DesRosiers' Vétiver. The horror of the Duvalier years is not ignored in DesRosiers' first book, Métropolis Opéra (whose dedication reads: "These verses are not dedicated to you who moans in the Tropics") or Péan's Zombie Blues, which echoes Etienne's early novels through the repulsive figure of a Duvalierist bogeyman let loose in Montreal. By contrast, Agnant's La Dot de Sara, and especially Le Livre d'Emma, proffer a modern feminist point of view on traditional gender imbalance in Haiti.

   And there is Georges Anglade, the most original writer of the group, who adapts the Haitian oral narrative form of lodyans in three collections of short stories (Les Blancs de mémoire; Leurs jupons dépassent; Ce pays qui m'habite). His is a notable attempt at formal and thematic renewal in a series of interlocking  stories set in Canada and Haiti using the village (Nédgé and Quina, respectively) as a unifying metaphor. These humorous stories are told by a first-person narrator who lives in Montreal and speaks from a more comprehensive temporal perspective than the restricted spatial perspective of most of his predecessors. The narrator's manipulation of language is undoubtedly reminiscent of Jacques Roumain's use of the language of the élite, French, resounding with the tonality of the people's vernacular Creole. A conscious attempt is made to reconcile the polarities between classes, expatriates and natives, Creole and French speakers in Haiti and in Canada.

   Neither the first nor the second generation of Haitian-Canadian writers feels rooted in Canada to the extent of creating fully developed Canadian characters. There are no French-speaking Canadian characters in the novels and short stories of Ollivier, Laferrière and Phelps. They are cardboard figures, alternatively victims of the bogeyman in the works of Péan and Etienne, and helpful allies of helpless Haitians in Etienne's Un Ambassadeur macoute à Montréal and Une Femme muette.  But for Laferrière's use of an African character in his first novel, none of the writers turns to Africa for a broadening of the representation of the Haitian condition. Ollivier traces the plight of Haitian boat people in Florida, in Passages, and Laferrière caricatures the sex drive of American tourists in La Chair du maître.

   There are a few English-Canadian co-eds and do-gooders in Laferrière's first novel and Etienne's Une Femme muette: they purportedly represent the bilingual nature of  Canada. Ideology of a nationalist or racialist nature is identified with the excesses of  Negritude personified by Papa Doc Duvalier that the second generation chooses to exorcise in the process of reinvention.

   Finally, there are the novels of Alix Renaud and Stanley Norris whose  characters are solely French-Canadians. Both writers follow the example of the early Haitian novelist, Démesvar Delorme, for whom Haiti did not even exist as he  set his  Francesca (1872) in sixteenth-century Italy. Delorme also was an expatriate writer. It is a measure of the relative achievements of his compatriots in Canada that they, as a whole, chose to create or reinvent their Haitianness.


                                                                                              Max Dorsinville


Selected Bibliography


Agnant, Marie-Celie
(1995). La Dot de Sara. Montreal: éditions du Remue-Ménage.
(2001). Le Livre díemma. Montreal:éditions du Remue-Menage.

Anglade, Georges
(1999). Les Blancs de mémoire. Montréal: Boréal.
(2000). Leurs jupons dépassent. Montréal: CIDIHCA.
(2002). Ce pays qui m¹habite. Montréal: Lanctôt.

Delorme, Démesvar (1873). Francesca: les jeux du sort. Paris: E. Dentu

DesRosiers, Joël
(1987). Metropolis Opera. Montreal: Tryptique.
(1999). Vetiver. Montreal: Tryptique.

Devieux-Dehoue, Liliane
(1976). L'Amour oui, la mort non. Sherbrooke: Naaman.

Etienne, Gérard V.
(1974). Le Negre crucifie. Montréal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique.
(1979). Un Ambassadeur macoute ý Montréal: éditions Nouvelle Optique.
(1984). Une Femme muette. Montreal: éditions Nouvelle Optique.

Jonassaint, Jean (1986). Le Pouvoir des mots, les maux du pouvoir. Montréal:  ArcsntËre/PUM.

Laferrière, Dany
(1985). Comment faire l¹amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer.     Montréal :  VLB.
(1991). Une Odeur de café. Montréal :  VLB.
(1992).  Le Gost des jeunes filles. Montréal :  VLB.
(1997). Le Charme des après-midi sans fin. Montréal : Lanctôt.

Norris, Stanley Lloyd
(1991). LíInterdit. Montreal: Libre expression.
(1993). La Pucelle. Montreal: Libre expression
(1993). L¹Homme qui décrocha la lune. Chicoutimi: JCL.

Ollivier, Émile
(1977). Paysage de l¹aveugle. Montréal: Éditions Pierre Tisseyre.
(1983). Mère-Solitude. Paris: Albin Michel.
(1986). La Discorde aux cent voix. Paris: Albin Michel.
( 1991). Passages. Montreal: L¹Hexagone.
(1995). Les Urnes scellées. Paris: Albin Michel.

Péan, Stanley
(1988). La Plage des songes. Montréal: CIDIHCA.
(1996). Zombie Blues. Montréal: éditions La Courte échelle.

Phelps, Anthony
(1973) Moins l¹infini. Paris: Les editeurs Français Reunis.
(1976). Mémoire en colin-maillard. Montréal: éditions Nouvelle Optique.

Renaud, Alix
(1985). A Corps joie. Montréal: éditions Nouvelle Optique.

Roumain, Jacques
(1944). Gouverneurs de la rosée. Paris: Les Éditeurs Français Réunis.