Journal articles on the topic 'Haitian poetry'

To explore Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s rise from obscure rural Haiti to become the nation’s first democratically elected president—by a landslide—is to enter into a world and a swirl of events that reads like surreal fiction or magical realism. As a Catholic priest (Salesian order), Aristide was fueled by the religio-socialist principles of liberation theology, which emerged as a significant force in Latin America primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, forcefully and vocally advocating for the masses of Haitian poor mired in deeply-entrenched disenfranchisement and exploitation. As a charismatic spokesperson for the popular democratic movement in Haiti during an era of entrenched dictatorship and repressive violence, Aristide boldly confronted the “four-headed monster” of the Haitian power structure—the army, the church hierarchy, the tontons macoutes, and the wealthy elite. His seemingly impossible escape from multiple assassination attempts, together with the power of his colorful rhetoric and his close association with urban slum dwellers and rural peasants, led to a rising “flood” (or lavalas) that invested him with an aura of Spirit, or mistik, that in either/both the Haitian-embraced tradition of Christianity or vodoun (voodoo) served to energize and greatly reassure an intense mass movement arrayed against seemingly impossible odds. This article focuses on the rise of Aristide as the embodiment and voice of Spirit among the people and does not extend into his tumultuous secular years in and out of the presidency, having been twice the victim of coups (1991 and 2004); instead it focuses primarily on the years 1985–1990 and does not enter into an assessment of Aristide as president. Aristide’s own vivid narratives of this time, segments of his sermons, and later, passages of his poetry serve to bolster the literary quality or interpretation of this brief but vividly colorful historic epoch in the Haitian experience.

Franck Fouché was born on 27 November 1915, in Saint-Marc, Haiti. His formative years were precisely the period of the first American occupation of the island. He received his baccalauréat from the Lycée Pétion in 1934. After studying literature at the Université d'Haïti, he returned to Saint-Marc as a professor of literature and director of the Lycée Sténio-Vincent in 1940. He began to publish poetry (‘Billet à Florel’, 1941) and founded a literary review, Horizon (1942). He wrote for two daily newspapers, Le National and Le Nouvelliste in 1944. He received a Licence en Droit from the Université d'Haïti in 1945. After serving as Editor of Le National (1953–4), he was appointed Cultural Attaché at the Haitian Embassy in Mexico City in 1957. Along with a number of Haitian intellectuals, he emigrated from the Duvalierist Haiti to Montreal in 1966. He taught in Chambly. At the Université du Québec à Montréal, he completed an M.A. thesis, Vodou et théâtre; pour un nouveau théâtre populaire (1976). Following an automobile accident, he died on 3 January 1978 in Montreal.

Theoretician and proponent of a “Nation Language” meant to provide the Caribbean peoples with a decolonized set of words and concepts adapted to their particular worldview and historical experience, Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite did not, as might have been expected, elaborate a monolithic Creole poetics. Instead of basing his creative work on the “defense and illustration” of one particular, localized language, Brathwaite experimented with linguistic plurality and dissonance as means for an opening of the possible. This poetic project is at the core of his 1973 trilogy The Arrivants, where the friction between Standard English, Bajan, Jamaican Patois, African American Vernacular, Haitian Creole and Akan parallels the different territories, voices and historicities of the African Diaspora. The experiments with linguistic and cultural frictions make the reader question his/her own linguistic reflexes and imagine new communities.

Abstract: This article considers the timing of the Académie d'Amiens poetry contest on "L'Abolition de la traite des Nègres" (1819–20), the little-known predecessor to the Académie française prix de poésie on "L'Abolition de la traite des Noirs" (1823). The Amiens concours attempted to offer a timely commemoration of the slave trade's abolition. Close readings of the competition's archival records, including twelve submitted poems and two reports, suggest reasons why a winner was never chosen. The persistence of the clandestine slave trade and pro-slavery arguments blaming abolitionism for the recent events of the Haitian Revolution challenged the possibility and value of the proposed commemoration. The Amiens contest ultimately bears witness to a shift in contemporary perceptions of the slave trade's abolition during the Bourbon Restoration: from the celebration of an event to the realization that its history was far from over.

ABSTRACT Classically trained Black musician Leyla McCalla’s album Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes (2014) intertwines innovative folk- and blues-inspired settings of Hughes’s blues poetry, interpretations of traditional Haitian folk songs, and original compositions. This article argues that the album constitutes both a vital homage to Hughes’s impact on Black diasporic culture and a feminist boundary-breaking reshaping of the expectations of the hegemonic, white-washing contemporary music industry. It reads together the album’s ambitious liner notes, accompanying visual elements, and sonic choices of selected tracks to show how McCalla, by innovatively syncretizing typically disparate genres, inherits and extends the radical political and cultural tradition of the blues women whom Hughes’s poetry often depicted. Thus, it draws on frameworks from Hughes criticism and from performance studies scholars such as Daphne Brooks to suggest that Black female artists like McCalla warrant the attention of diasporic cultural critics equally to and alongside aesthetic ancestors like Hughes who inspire them. These women are epistemologically intervening in the construction of literary and cultural history through projects like Vari-Colored Songs, an impressive artifact that wrenchingly brings together traditions to address diasporic problems such as eco-precarity and to celebrate Black women’s resilient persistence through such endemic conditions.

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.

Allons, la vraie poésie est ailleurs. Come on, true poetry lies elsewhere.—Suzanne CésaireThe Recent Death of AIMÉ Césaire has Been an Occasion for Extolling his Virtues As Venerable Patriarch, Founding Father, and sovereign artist. Even his fiercest critics have considered him a unique poet-politician worthy of being interred in the Pantheon by the French state. Members of the créolité movement, such as Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau, hailed him as the “nègre fondamental” ‘foundational black man,’ who was also like the father of the Martinican people. Confiant reiterated his filial devotion as Césaire's “fils à jamais” ‘son forevermore,’ and Chamoiseau identified him as the “maître-marronneur” ‘master Maroon.’ This wave of adulation tends to emphasize the militant poet-politician that Césaire never quite was. He was arguably the founder neither of a nation nor of a people nor, for that matter, of a movement. While he coined the word négritude, he was less the founder of the negritude movement than was his contemporary Léopold Sédar Senghor, who set about creating a totalizing, biologically based ideology around the concept of negritude. Perhaps even more telling is his view of the Haitian leader Henry Christophe as tragically flawed because of Christophe's obsession with founding a people. The protagonist of the play La tragédie du roi Christophe (The Tragedy of King Christophe) is a heedless builder, so obsessed by the need to construct and to found that he destroys himself, leaving behind the massive stone ship of the Citadelle as his legacy.

-Peter Hulme, Polly Pattullo, Last resorts: The cost of tourism in the Caribbean. London: Cassell/Latin America Bureau and Kingston: Ian Randle, 1996. xiii + 220 pp.-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du Divers. Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1995. 106 pp.-Bruce King, Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of conquest / Masks of resistance: The invention of cultural identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. xii + 196 pp.-Sidney W. Mintz, Raymond T. Smith, The Matrifocal family: Power, pluralism and politics. New York: Routledge, 1996. x + 236 pp.-Raymond T. Smith, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Boston: Beacon, 1995. xix + 191 pp.-Michiel Baud, Samuel Martínez, Peripheral migrants: Haitians and Dominican Republic sugar plantations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. xxi + 228 pp.-Samuel Martínez, Michiel Baud, Peasants and Tobacco in the Dominican Republic, 1870-1930. Knoxville; University of Tennessee Press, 1995. x + 326 pp.-Robert C. Paquette, Aline Helg, Our rightful share: The Afro-Cuban struggle for equality, 1886-1912. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xii + 361 pp.-Daniel C. Littlefield, Roderick A. McDonald, The economy and material culture of slaves: Goods and Chattels on the sugar plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. xiv + 339 pp.-Jorge L. Chinea, Luis M. Díaz Soler, Puerto Rico: desde sus orígenes hasta el cese de la dominación española. Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994. xix + 758 pp.-David Buisseret, Edward E. Crain, Historic architecture in the Caribbean Islands. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. ix + 256 pp.-Hilary McD. Beckles, Mavis C. Campbell, Back to Africa. George Ross and the Maroons: From Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1993. xxv + 115 pp.-Sandra Burr, Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life before emancipation. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. xii + 244 pp.-Carlene J. Edie, Trevor Munroe, The cold war and the Jamaican Left 1950-1955: Reopening the files. Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1992. xii + 242 pp.-Carlene J. Edie, David Panton, Jamaica's Michael Manley: The great transformation (1972-92). Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1993. xx + 225 pp.-Percy C. Hintzen, Cary Fraser, Ambivalent anti-colonialism: The United States and the genesis of West Indian independence, 1940-1964. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1994. vii + 233 pp.-Anthony J. Payne, Carlene J. Edie, Democracy in the Caribbean: Myths and realities. Westport CT: Praeger, 1994. xvi + 296 pp.-Alma H. Young, Jean Grugel, Politics and development in the Caribbean basin: Central America and the Caribbean in the New World Order. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. xii + 270 pp.-Alma H. Young, Douglas G. Lockhart ,The development process in small island states. London: Routledge, 1993. xv + 275 pp., David Drakakis-Smith, John Schembri (eds)-Virginia Heyer Young, José Solis, Public school reform in Puerto Rico: Sustaining colonial models of development. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. x + 171 pp.-Carolyn Cooper, Christian Habekost, Verbal Riddim: The politics and aesthetics of African-Caribbean Dub poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. vii + 262 pp.-Clarisse Zimra, Jaqueline Leiner, Aimé Césaire: Le terreau primordial. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1993. 175 pp.-Clarisse Zimra, Abiola Írélé, Aimé Césaire: Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. With introduction, commentary and notes. Abiola Írélé. Ibadan: New Horn Press, 1994. 158 pp.-Alvina Ruprecht, Stella Algoo-Baksh, Austin C. Clarke: A biography. Barbados: The Press - University of the West Indies; Toronto: ECW Press, 1994. 234 pp.-Sue N. Greene, Glyne A. Griffith, Deconstruction, imperialism and the West Indian novel. Kingston: The Press - University of the West Indies, 1996. xxiii + 147 pp.-Donald R. Hill, Peter Manuel ,Caribbean currents: Caribbean music from Rumba to Reggae. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. xi + 272 pp., Kenneth Bilby, Michael Largey (eds)-Daniel J. Crowley, Judith Bettelheim, Cuban festivals: An illustrated anthology. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. x + 261 pp.-Judith Bettelheim, Ramón Marín, Las fiestas populares de Ponce. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1994. 277 pp.-Marijke Koning, Eric O. Ayisi, St. Eustatius: The treasure island of the Caribbean. Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1992. xviii + 224 pp.-Peter L. Patrick, Marcyliena Morgan, Language & the social construction of identity in Creole situations. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American studies, UCLA, 1994. vii + 158 pp.-John McWhorter, Tonjes Veenstra, Serial verbs in Saramaccan: Predication and Creole genesis. The Hague: Holland Academic Graphic, 1996. x + 217 pp.-John McWhorter, Jacques Arends, The early stages of creolization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995. xv + 297 pp.

In 1982, the Haitian writer Louis-Philippe Dalembert published his first collection of poetry, Évangile pour les miens. It was the beginning of a prolific, multiform, and successful career. During the next thirty years, he has published four other poetry collections, four collections of short stories, ten novels, and numerous essays. Intended as a tribute to Dalembert’s literary work, this article will try to describe the evolution of his production in verse and prose. In particular, three recurrent themes will be discussed: 1) the elaboration in his first texts of a system of rememorating strategies that will lead to the formulation of the notion of ‘pays-temps’; 2) the use of an urban setting, namely the borough, to convey the collective values of the community; 3) the birth, in his late publications, of a universal poetics transcending any type of border.

Abstract This article explores the life history of Ulrick Rosarion, a Haitian federal prosecutor who built his career during the Duvalier dictatorship. Rosarion lived his entire life in a small house of downtown Port-au-Prince, in a neighborhood formerly inhabited by the Black middle-classes that gained prominence in the political and administrative sphere during the dictatorship (1957-1986). Rosarion was also a writer who produced four books of nationalist poetry. Based on interviews and readings of his literary production, and beyond, through an exploration of architectural forms and material remnants echoing the dictatorship, this paper explores how an idealized version of the dictatorship today haunts the political landscape of Haiti. Moreover, this article argues that the state takes on a sensual form that allows for the diffusion and/or rupture of past ideologies.

La editorial Casa de las Américas publicará en septiembre del 2017, la antología de poesía haitiana Ayiti Cheri. Poesía haitiana (1800-2015), tres siglos de canto a la Libertad.Un proyecto innovador que reúne a 70 poetisas y poetas haitianos, y 170 poemas en francés o creol, traducidos al español

In this collection of poems, I narratively engage each chapter in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred to examine disability and Black life anew. My engagement with the tale of longing, time-travel, and slavery that Butler weaves together in the novel is moved by an interpretive, or a phenomenological, disability studies approach, where “the experience of disability, our own or that of others, becomes the scene where we can frame how we experience embodied existence and, thus, disability becomes a place where culture can be examined anew, again and again” (Titchkosky & Michalko, 2012/2017, p. 77). Interpretive disability studies surfaces necessary questions around how we make sense of boundaries that distance ‘normal’ from ‘non-normal.’ Haitian author, Edwidge Danticat’s (2018) desire to make sense of separation is what brought her, in part, “…to the internal geography of words and how they can bridge sentences” (para. 10). Following in Danticat’s footsteps, while remaining indebted to the wisdom of Black women storytellers' writ large, I hope to understand the separations among the characters of Kindred, namely among Kevin, Rufus, Alice, Alice’s mother, Hagar, Dana and her ancestors, and Tom Weylin, and, in so doing, emerge, through poetry, from a geography of words charted by Butler and again encountered. The below poetic emergence reveals all boundaries as bridged, showing how disability can become a place where culture can be examined anew. For Dana and her ancestors, perhaps we might wonder about what it means to be in kindred with notions of normal and non-normal, and to live in kindred with one another.

Abstract "The Sublime Turn Away from Empire" argues that the Haitian Revolution—and Toussaint l'Ouverture's role in it—heavily influenced Wordsworth during his early years and that the1802 sonnet to Toussaint l'Ouverture epitomizes the poet's development of the "sublime turn." The Wordsworthian sublime, often interpreted in part as a reaction to the violence of the French Revolution, thus appears in this article as a reaction to the frightening and incomprehensible facts of colonial slavery and revolution—the very realities responsible for L'Ouverture's capture, imprisonment, and eventual death in France's Fort de Joux. In this context, the poet formulates his sublime turn as a turn away from the recognition of material slavery and bondage and toward an imaginative freedom nationed specifically English. In pursuing the argument, the article reviews the history of the Haitian Revolution together with the history of Wordsworth's poetic development from 1790 to 1802. In paying special attention to the 1802 sonnets, the article highlights Wordsworth's juxtaposition of French slavery and English liberty and draws on work by Laura Doyle and Alison Hickey to argue that Wordsworth's valorization of nature and nation has the effect of sublimating his own, and his reader's, recognition of empire and race. Ultimately, though Wordsworth speaks of l'Ouverture in a markedly admiring tone, he counsels him to submit to Napoleonic tyranny anyway—while taking comfort in the material sublime. The article explores this paradox and concludes by postulating that such a contradiction is characteristic of Romantic-era attitudes toward race and the sublime.